Is there anyone who watches the sun go down and thinks they’re seeing the world move? Anyone who looks at the night sky and thinks they’re seeing galaxies racing away from the world and from each other, going slower and slower but never stopping, the universe growing colder and darker as the stars burn out one by one?

And:

Songbirds were singing: robins and warblers and phoebes and wrens. The white-throated sparrow. Maybe even a bobolink or meadowlark, though there were fewer of them than before. Theirs is a kind of music that lightens the human heart, and there is no telling what we’ll do to one another when it finally stops.