After tonight’s showing of “Casablanca” and just before the airing of “The Big Sleep,” Turner Movie Classics presented a short memorial to the famous and the notable.

By itself, not so notable. At the end of the year, lots of outlets do these kinds of things. Modern life is suffused with the impulse of turning the joyful into the melancholy.

But the TCM memorial is better than that. Check it out on you tube.

The music is by Joe Henry ^[1] and the song is “God Only Knows ^[2].” Listen to it. It has a kind of transcendental quality to it.