Meditations on his public legacy and political past mingle with childhood memories and banal facts of his frail existence to produce surreal moments, both beautiful and comic, of detachment and isolation – the loneliness that comes with facing "the frontier between life and death".
How else can one explain the impact on other men's and women's personal lives and memories of quite banal advocacies for decency, for truthfulness, for absolute scruple in the handling of language, a good many of which closely reflect Wittgenstein's imitation of the later Tolstoy?
Long silences were punctuated by spontaneous reflections and memories, sometimes well-meant but banal, sometimes intensely felt and surprising.
But, as the show drags on towards the 90-minute mark, Kitson's lists of Church Road memories get repetitive and sometimes banal.
Mayer-Schönberger says: "My stepfather's diary was probably incredibly meaningful for him because when he read some banal detail about butter, maybe that triggered the memory of the place for him.
The contrast with Miliband was clear from the start when Cameron hailed a D-day veteran, implicitly making Miliband's memories of meeting Gareth and others in public parks seem banal by comparison.
Instead, critics who once denigrated him as a humorless purveyor of diluted swing, banal novelties, and saccharine vocals are reassessing a sound that clings relentlessly to the collective memory.
After each screening I reemerged into the throngs of tourists at Potsdamer Platz without much to show for my effort, only the memory of time spent in various zones of exclusion from the familiar and banal.
Through the holes in his 'unreliable' memory flood accounts of random encounters in pubs or eventless jaunts in his Austin 1100, banal observations dressed up as insight.
Its content — romanticizing supposed memories of a boyhood that Gorky regularly lied about — is "poetic" in ways that turn treacly and banal when you try to appreciate them.
