All of the songs he liked faded out, or most them did. And so I became a connoisseur of fade outs. I bought cassettes...and listened very closely, trying to catch that precise moment when the person in the recording studio had begun to turn the volume dial down, or whatever it was he did. Some times I'd turn the volume dial up at just the same speed. I thought of...the ghostly hand of the producer turning it down, so that the sound stayed on an even plane. I'd got to this sort of trance...where I thought that if I kept turning it up...the song would not stop, it would just continue indefinitely. And so what I had thought of before as a kind of artistic sloppiness, this attempt to imply that oh yeah, we're a bunch of endlessly creative folks who jam all night, and the bad old record producer finally has to turn the volume down on us just so we don't fill the whole album with one monster song, became for me instead this kind of, this kind of summation of hopefulness.
...
It’s the same with shadows. The beautiful thing isn’t the alligators or bats you can make with your hands, the beautiful thing is the way the shadow image allows you to see so precisely what the outer contour of your own hand really looks like, those little bunches of flesh under bent finger joint.
Vox, 1992
Nicholson Baker (1952 - )
