As in our own time the permafrost of modernity has at last begun to melt–and a more determinedly pluralistic world has bounded back into an often troubling life–the world we are seeing is not a strange new world, revealed as the glaciers draw back, but a strange old world: kinship, locality, embodiment, domesticity, affect. All of these things, but I would add that at times we are seeing them in something as actual–and as tangible–as the tomb of two friends buried in an English parish church. We did not see those tombs because they did not signify; but they are beginning to signify again.
–last lines of The Friend (not counting the afterword)