With "Tassili," released on Tuesday, Tinariwen, whose music is a hard-rocking hybrid of Berber, Arab, Western and black African styles, has sought to return to its beginnings.
You might want to return to the beginnings of his career in the 1980s – the era of 2000AD and The Sandman – or ask about the first glimmerings of his 1999 novel Stardust.
I have named it Genesis because, as far as possible, I want to return to the beginnings of our planet: to the air, water and fire that gave birth to life; to the animal species that have resisted domestication and are still "wild"; to the remote tribes whose "primitive" way of life is largely untouched; and to surviving examples of the earliest forms of human settlement and organisation.
Ultimately Daniel Muir was drawn to the restoration movement associated with Alexander Campbell, which claimed to return to the unspoiled beginnings of the Christian faith, free of the excrescences that had built up in the intervening centuries.
He then goes on to look at Jobs through the adoption lens, pointing out that Jobs' parents gave him up and that his drive comes from the need to return to his physical beginnings, that his work is some sort of strange oral stage in entrepreneurialism.
Were we to return to the earliest beginnings, nothing could be further from the truth.
The book returns to the beginnings of the vampire outbreak, where we find out more about the origins of some of the characters we've come to know.
Joyce's endings are almost sentimental: the ending of "Ulysses" is famously one big birthday-party-bright "Yes," while "Finnegan's Wake" ends neatly and hopefully, if dreamily, by returning to its beginnings.
It's hard to tell why – because Roth's answers are circumlocutory, filled with metaphor and grandly entertaining – but my guess is it's to illustrate how his life has returned to its beginnings.
More confoundingly, Shakespeare's plot does not return to or resolve its beginnings, which is why the scene is easy to omit.
