Nevertheless, he was the one I had turned to. He was the one to whom I’d told everything. He was the one I’d be calling when this whole ordeal was over. But I don’t say any of this.

—

My friend, who is probably the best-read person I know, has been having trouble reading. Ever since my diagnosis, she said. The only time in her life when she wasn’t in the middle of several books at once and all eager to move on to new ones.

She had tried turning to books she’d already read, she told me, the ones that had meant the most to her.

But the old magic just isn’t there, she said. My favorite writers, my favorite books—they don’t affect me like they did before. I don’t have the patience. It’s really not so different from reading bad stuff, you know. The way I keep wanting to say, Why are you telling me all this?

I tell her about another writer, who wrote on a literary journal’s blog about a visit to a former professor whose passion for modern literature had inspired and helped shape the writer when he was a student. Now wheelchair-bound and with much time on his hands, the professor reported that he’d been rereading modern masters—Faulkner, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and so on. To the writer’s question How did they hold up? the old man replied that they did not. Like completely empty performances, he judged them. Not worth it at all.

But it’s not just reading, my friend said. It’s hard for me to know what I should pay attention to anymore. It’s been very strange with music, for example. I used to like listening to different kinds of music, she said, but now it’s become something of an irritant. Who’d have thought?

Most pop songs sounded drearily the same to her, she said. And the inanity of the lyrics (Why no exceptions to this rule, ever? she asked), which had never really bothered her before, now depressed her.

And lately a lot of classical music also seemed to depress her, she said. It was too much. Too serious, too moving. Too, too unbearably sad, she said.

I was startled to hear this. Recently, classical music had begun unsettling me in much the same way. Music I once loved and considered a blessing and a balm I could no longer listen to, a change I didn’t at all understand but that I found heartbreaking.

The owners of the house had a passion for old films. Among their large collection of DVDs was Make Way for Tomorrow, a film neither of us had seen before. I was eager to see it when I remembered that it had been an inspiration for Ozu’s great film Tokyo Story.