David Bowie seemed immortal; that's one of the most common reactions to his passing. People are surprised to find that they just hadn't considered the possibility that this man, this icon, the ultimate changeling, might one day no longer be with us.

That feature of his personality has been with us from the beginning. To a child growing up in England in the 1970s, Bowie was already immortal. Had I been told back then his fame was only as old as the decade, I would have laughed a withering laugh. Bowie was our Mount Rushmore, except with more faces, and all of them painted in technicolor.

Even then, Bowie was impossibly distant, a strange thin god of pain and poetry. He was a prophet from the future, a modern-day Pan that the grown-ups had no hope of controlling. He could show up anywhere at any time — on any child's bedroom wall, on any radio, on a BBC documentary (Cracked Actor, a classic of the genre.)

If you haven't seen Cracked Actor, please take the next 53 minutes and watch it all below, because it has more to say on the essence of Bowie than any of the millions of words that will be written about him today can convey.

Bowie begs to be seen, heard, felt, more than theorized about. You can only understand how fragile and brilliant he was in 1974 at the key pivot of his life — a pivot all startups should study — by seeing him warts and all.

A man so buffeted by fame and success was done in, addled by cocaine, artistically blocked. It was a dangerous moment, one familiar from so many rock-and-roll suicides. He could easily have thrown away his life there and then. Instead, he reinvented himself.

The transition to what we now think of as 1980s Bowie really happened here, with the Thin White Duke phase, seven years ahead of schedule. But then, Bowie had never really existed in the now. He'd been living in the future ever since the 1960s, fueled by Warhol and the New York sound.

He made folk-singing androgyny cool, then ditched it for glitter rock. When English law and culture had only just caught up to homosexuality, he was the only celebrity talking about bisexuality. His absolute unapologetic unabashed weirdness was a preview of the age we live in, the age of freaks and geeks.

He became the poet of the post-Moon landing age before any of us knew we were living in it, recording Space Oddity weeks before Apollo 11 touched down. Space-obsessed years before Star Wars, he prophesied a Star Man, considered life on Mars, told us to freak out in a Moonage Daydream.

Then the Barbarella-like spider from Mars blew himself up, impatient to get on to the next decade while the rest of us were still wondering what the 1970s were all about. He was so iconoclastic with himself, it's no wonder the punk movement counted him as one of its heroes.

New image casually applied, he moved to and conquered America in one fell swoop — and managed to lambaste the country for its short attention span at the same time. "Do you remember your President Nixon?" he sneered in 1975's Young Americans, less than a year after Nixon resigned. "Do you remember the bills you had to pay, or even yesterday?" And nobody minded, because the critique came wrapped up in a smooth, soulful bow.

Bowie took himself both more and less seriously than anyone else. He was forever self-effacing, his own laughing critic. Memorably he described Young Americans as "the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey."

Fellow white limey John Lennon was on that album, playing second fiddle to the most creative Englishman of the age, helping him nail the concept of fame and its bitter business underworld. Bowie nicked Lennon's most famous lyric for the title song; he was the only being in the universe who could get away with it.

And he was funny — that's something we often forget amid the weirdness. The first time I heard the first line of Fashion, I had to stop the tape and laugh out loud for a good five minutes. "There's a brand new dance," he said, imitating a million 1960s numbers, "but I don't know it's name." With snarky wit like this, Bowie was a one-man Twitter, decades ahead of his time.

When Bowie spoke on something, it felt like both a message from the future and a definitive deconstruction, whether the subject was fame or fashion or global politics. The Berlin Wall, the global focus of the grim 1980s, came down in 1989, but Bowie had already felled its purpose with Heroes in 1977. No wonder the German government credited him Monday with bringing it down.

Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall. https://t.co/soaOUWiyVl #RIPDavidBowie — GermanForeignOffice (@GermanyDiplo) January 11, 2016

Meanwhile, no song ever captured the alienation of America's homeless epidemic better than Under Pressure in 1981, and the epidemic hadn't even begun yet.

It is fitting that Under Pressure, a tense collaboration with the almost-as-chameleon-like Freddie Mercury, is Bowie's most popular song (at least by the ever-revealing metric of Spotify favorites). Bowie was an inveterate collaborator, recognizing and wheedling the best work out of others ever since Mick Ronson's riff on Ziggy Stardust. In this case he rescued Queen from the doldrums of the band's worst-ever album to create one of its best-ever songs.

There was little room for anyone else in Bowie's spotlight, yet he kept inviting others into it. The results ranged from the massively mainstream (Stevie Ray Vaughan on Let's Dance) to the campy (Dancing in the Street with Mick Jagger, possibly the most immortal and certainly the most ridiculous portion of Live Aid in 1985) to the utterly obscure (the heavy metal band Tin Machine he founded in 1988).

By then he'd reinvented himself so many times that the reinvention was becoming cliche. He was running out of parts of himself to critique. Back in 1980 he'd taken his earliest iconic character, Major Tom of Space Oddity, and savagely turned him into a heroin junkie. We lapped up the result; it shot to number one and created the most influential video of the decade.

After the huge and unexpected success of Let's Dance four year later, Bowie reacted to his own reinvention. He went through what he later derided as his "Phil Collins phase" in which he "fucked with my integrity" and actually attempted to release popular albums. He had a brief flirtation with Hollywood (Labyrinth and Absolute Beginners, neither received well.)

All of which is what Bowie was restlessly reacting to with the anti-popular Tin Machine — which foretold and arguably helped inspire the rise of 1990s grunge. Sometimes you can't lose for winning.

Where was there to go after that? Only a kind of slow-motion retirement, one dragged out over many years and many reinventions. The remaining formulas were examined by rote. He experimented with electronica, hip hop and drum 'n' bass. In 2000, he appeared and sang in an overlooked computer game named Omikron, another attempt to throw himself as far forward into the future as possible.

But the era of lifetime achievement awards and harmless duets had begun, conspiring to make him look like a relic of the past. When cancer finally caught up with the man who seemed immortal, he threw all his efforts into one last and most extreme experimental album, Blackstar, released this month.

Critics weren't sure exactly what they were hearing — except that it was coming from the future.

May we continue to meet him there, and may his influence last for centuries.