Arthur Miller had such an influence on the world that it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve seen his plays. “That’s the thing about great works of art: We can’t imagine a time before they existed, before certain phrases and ideas were part of the very air we breathed. And thus even if you’ve never seen “Death of a Salesman” or haven’t read “The Crucible” since high school — you’re still influenced by Arthur Miller, who died Thursday at age 89. The world is so suffused with the wisdom of those plays, with their indispensability, that we can’t envision somebody actually sitting down and writing them, line by line, and cursing and wadding up sheets of paper and trying again.”