A year ago today, David Bowie died, as we all will have to at some point. In that there is arguably nothing too remarkable, no lesson that is all that unique, and memorializing someone none of us really knew could be overfamiliar and self-indulgent. After all, it was David Jones who died, who we strangers have no right to grieve. Who that person is remained a mystery to the end, by his own artful design—and by the nature of personhood itself, which he demonstrated again and again to be an ongoing construction, an art form. The tone and even title of his last song on his last album, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” suggests what any appreciative listener already knew. It was his life’s…

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