In the weeks since all the bars, clubs, and restaurants closed; since the playgrounds emptied out and the city buses became ghost vessels; since a million little rituals disappeared—hands shaken and bodies held—we’ve all been engaged in a million silent acts of calculation. What does it feel like now that x is gone; how will I feel if y also disappears.

There are multiple losses to trace right now. The biggest ones are wrecking balls, and their size and scope can eclipse the subtler and more insidious ones, which are more like a slow gas leak. The disappearance of live music is a little of both; a wrecking ball for musicians, and a gas leak for the rest of us. Faced with loss of livelihood, health, or even of loved ones, the lack of concerts might seem a frivolous concern, but the spiritual dimensions of the loss are staggering.

In a city, particularly, live music is simply always there. On any given night, even if you are prostrate on your couch with your laptop on your chest, you could gaze out the window and be reassured that hundreds upon hundreds of small rooms were filled with people listening to others.

When you can’t go see live music anymore, at all, because everyone is forced to stay home, you revert back to the world of your own impulses. Your mental boundaries constrict to the size of your home, and you become a cult of one. You can learn things about yourself, but little of other people. For most of us, music lives in our heads as a rumor, something more or less indistinguishable from the sound of our thoughts. When you stream music, the sound simply materializes. It has the quality, however subconscious, of a hallucination, something happening in your own nervous system with no real analogue to the material world.

For me, music is largely an antisocial activity; I spend hours listening to recorded music instead of noticing the live sounds of the room I am in, or attuning myself to the voices of the people in those rooms. When I venture out to a concert, it’s usually to reassure myself that these strange dreams I’m having are real. Here they are, I’m always bemused to discover—smiling people, ones I’ve never met, somehow just as excited about this concert as I am. The dawning realization sounds as stupid on paper as it feels overwhelming in reality—these people have heard all of these sounds too. They were beckoned.

There is something like an invisible current that you can feel gathering around everyone in a room, even at a lackluster concert where the band isn’t engaged, and people are talking over them. All of that shapeless introspection finally comes to a point: All of you, standing in a single space, grazing elbows, holding your breath, staring at the same spot, basking in the same phenomenon. The effect is sometimes like putting down an engrossing novel only to walk outside and discover all the characters are real, walking about the city.

I have learned unforgettable things about strangers by going to shows. A small, simple one, plucked more or less at random: I remember seeing Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker play a solo show in 2018 at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom. I don’t even remember the song—maybe it was the encore, “Masterpiece”—but I distinctly recall how the woman next to me let out a quiet involuntary yelp when it started. Social norms being what they are, this is probably not a sound she made very often outside of her own house. But it emerged unbidden from her then, unselfconscious and delighted. There was no sense of shriveling or embarrassment after she made this noise—the air, primed by the music itself, was receptive to it all.