Losing David Lynch is so awful that it’s hard to know what to say or how best to say it.

Though he’d stepped away from feature film directing after Inland Empire (2006) and left as his long-form swan song the stunning return of the television show Twin Peaks (2017), as long as he lived there was always hope for one final Lynch movie. And just knowing he was there — alive and odd and chipper and liable to release at any moment some mad short film or weather report or cartoon featuring The Angriest Dog in the World  — was cheering. If there was room in the world for David Lynch to be successful and widely admired, maybe there’d be room in the world for your peculiar self as well?

No single tribute — millions will inevitably be generated in the coming days — could possibly convey the dazzling worth of Lynch’s films. Or, more personally, of certain experiences he gave those of us who were there to see his work emerge as it was first released into the world, bursting into a deathly sick culture that was already sliding downhill fast. His bracing vision made you feel that he knew it, too, and defied it. He refused even to acknowledge that anything was over, not if you were willing to look at it squarely and represent it fearlessly as you saw it.