"I remembered how Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn't." - Rob Sheffield

I've been reading a lot while I am here, and I loved Rob Sheffield's memoir, Love is a Mix Tape. He's a Rolling Stone journalist, and it's a music memoir about all the mix tapes he's gotten and given, many from his wife, Renee. It was the book I was reading in the Kroller-Muller Museum sculpture garden, when all this loveliness was around me and I just couldn't stand it so I wept.

But really, with words like this about people being kind after the death of his wife, what can you do but cry?

"You lose a certain innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness...People kept showing me unreasonable kindness, inexplicable kindness, indefensible kindness. People were kind when they knew that nobody would ever notice, much less praise them for it. People were even kind when they knew I wouldn't appreciate it.


I had no idea how to live up to that kindness...I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand...Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.


I was awed and ruined by this knowledge. Renee knew it all the time; I was learning it these days."

(from pages 121-123.)

I have experienced the kindness he speaks of, and I too, am grateful and in awe.