We all felt like we had a personal relationship with Bowie. Which is immediately a problem, because he didn’t have a personal relationship with us. So to mourn him and to watch hours of videos of him on YouTube is poignant but also disconcerting. Did we all love him because there were so many of him, one for every one of us? He did present many reflective surfaces—or certainly flat white ones, upon which we could project what we wanted, anyway. It is remarkable that there’s something for every gender, every sexuality, every race. Something for the loners and the weirdos and something for the preppy kids. (Mostly something for the loners and the weirdos.) But beyond those obvious conclusions there’s something he said in an interview which makes sense to me and cuts across the personae, and so cuts across us all: the theme in his work, if any, he said modestly, is the experience of isolation and misery, and the urge (the related urge) to make a connection with other people. I want an axe to break the ice.