Surely the trained eye can tell the rubble of one bombed city from that of another. Reporters on the ground, local residents who are still alive, certain architects and engineers can distinguish building materials, features of the urban landscape, possessions of the unlucky ones who lived there and lost everything — remnants of war-as-usual, common casualties of aggression ever more efficiently enabled by technological advances in the science of devastation — but to me, viewing the pictures from this distance, it all looks pretty much the same.

What we couldn’t bear to witness firsthand (only we would if we had to, like all those other ordinary civilians) we are force-fed in images flooding our screens and pages paid for by advertising aimed at those of us still solvent enough to shop. Even the broke and homeless, some of them, still have their phones to keep them connected to something, if only pictures of their ex-lives — like mine in frames on walls and shelves of the small museum where I live among personal artifacts, evidence of a life easily obliterated by a single bomb, but for now peacefully preserving a private history for a perennially self-guided tour.

That’s how it feels to me anyway, at the end of a dark year I have no desire to review, except for those few days of beauty, joy and pleasure that caught me by surprise and reminded me of what I’d almost forgotten: a face, a voice, a song, a book, a meal, a work of art, the smashing ocean, the jay in the birdbath, a few words overheard in a stray conversation or read in a letter, an unexpectedly tender tone of gratitude for some minor kindness. Let the newspapers and influencers and rankers and evaluators publish their best-of lists; I am content to reflect in private on gifts of momentary grace that came and went in a flash whose afterglow vaguely lingers.

The brokenhearted faces, the shattered, the anxious, the anguished remind me regularly of how luck’s wheel spins and stops wherever it will. On balance, for now, while health holds out and I have a safe place to sleep, I seem to be doing OK, but for a while there, things weren’t going so well and there was no guarantee they’d ever get better. Luckily they did. Even so, friends died. Friendships ended in irreconcilable ideological differences. Loved ones joined the ancestors in an inaccessible afterlife. And yet, there was also that unforeseen exchange with a stranger standing in front of a painting in a gallery that seemed to mean more than what met the eye, like a poem that means more than words can say.

That’s what I’m trying to get at, in a prosaic way: the unsayable, the inexpressible, all the news that isn’t fit to print, that slipped through the lines, evaded the cameras, couldn’t be explained or narrated, whose plot could not be summarized because it wasn’t linear but all tangled up in sauce like a steaming plate of pasta that looks so delicious you don’t know whether to eat it or take a picture, or delicately taste it to savor its indescribable ingredients, or try to describe the effect the flavors have on your tongue, as if words could begin to do that.

Language, even nonfiction, only goes so far, like a finger pointing at something that won’t stay still. A river is like that: you can’t even step in it once — well, maybe during a drought — but this time of year when rain is doing its thing, as in a normal winter, the flow is moving too fast for you to go with it and all you can do is wonder as you are soaked in astonishment at the inexplicable, the unbelievable, the losses you never saw coming, and the ones you did see coming but couldn’t believe because you didn’t want to, and now you are bereft and all but speechless, as if you were standing in the ruins of a neighborhood you no longer recognize, except for those treasures barely discernible beneath layers of gray dust.

A soft brush, deployed with precision by a tough but sensitive hand, can discover what’s been blown away by time.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturday.