“— And I hear this and I start thinking, What is my child thinking?; now, for the first time, I need to know what my child is thinking; for what are his or her thoughts if not my own – though purified, and stripped of inessentials; that, for me, had been a reason to have a child: to be able to think again, but anew, afresh, displaced; after all, it is called conception; until now, I haven’t wanted to communicate with my child through anything even approximating language; all through my first months of pregnancy, I was glad to dispense with literal meaning, to free myself from the restrictions of verbal significance; then I could just listen, and hear what my child – my self – was telling me without words; and there was much that I heard; but no longer: now I want to hear what my child would like to say – what he or she would want to say; in an excess of significance I had waited 5 years before agreeing to conceive, following the California Organic Growers’ Association guidelines for reconversion of soil; it was foolish, I knew all along, but I needed it: I needed some objective metric; now, again, I need some objective metric: I want to know what my child is thinking; I can no longer rely on an absence of meaning: I have been betrayed by silence and interpretation; now I want to know what my child is thinking; I am terrified of unmeaning—”

(Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook, p. 419.)

“. . . I suppose, though, it’s just another expression of the inherent sadness of sound, of sound’s defective essence; after all, sound is so perishable: it’s no more than a nudging of air, a fragile sequence of crests and troughs – soft, ripply, rounded like Mallomars, and perilously dependent on its medium; it’s so different than light, which has hardness, and beaminess, and eternality; sound just dissolves, it radiates away into emptiness, resolving its curves into formlessness and passing through the atmosphere into directionless space; and this, too, is a sadness; for so much is lost; so much is lost; in fact, I can practically see the process happening right now, standing where I am – up here, on the roof; for up here, on my roof, looking towards the darkening sky, I can almost see the world’s endless dusts of sound silently dispersing – all of them powerlessly unfurling against the distant clouds, dissolving into the leveling night . . . ; and so, up here, with darkness descending, and with the breeze at my back, I plant my feet against the edges of a few sturdy slates, and get back to work, wondering what new things I’ll be able to pull in, with my antenna, so well anchored:”

(Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook, p. 58.)