And what the music elicits–in me, in most everyone who hears it and takes to it–is a strangely comforting, sensual melancholy, a gentle sadness, the kind that comes with soft rain. It’s the same for all truly great dark art. There’s a pleasure in seeing our shadows paraded beautifully. It’s liberating to find them so prettily decked out, a sort of reverse Halloween. William Todd Schultz
About This Quote

In the introduction to her essay, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” Jill Lepore quotes a passage from the second chapter of the novel Ulysses by James Joyce, describing a night at a Dublin music hall: "The orchestra played a waltz, and the dancers were whirling insanely to and fro. Like figures in a nightmare I saw them. A shudder ran through me. I felt sick and bewildered.

And then suddenly, like the breaking of some magical spell, the dead silence was broken by loud exultant shrieks of laughter. The noise grew stronger and stronger; it was like the rising of the wind; it seemed to come from all sides of the room; it filled my head; it seemed to be bursting from my own breast; I writhed in agony. And then, suddenly ceasing, it left me standing there mourning and sorrowing." The best art reminds us of our mortality; it reminds us that we are not immortal.

For all our supposed superiority over other creatures on this planet, we are subjectively as fragile as they are. We may be able to construct elaborate fantasies about how impervious we are to despair or defeat, but inwardly we know how fragile we are.

Source: Torment Saint: The Life Of Elliott Smith

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More Quotes By William Todd Schultz
  1. And what the music elicits–in me, in most everyone who hears it and takes to it–is a strangely comforting, sensual melancholy, a gentle sadness, the kind that comes with soft rain. It’s the same for all truly great dark art. There’s a pleasure in seeing...
  2. By now it is a ready-made cliché–the rock star dying young, whether by excess, by accident, or by suicide. For some, it’s part of the act, macabre performance art, a final song. This last mode, suicide, can be elusive. In fact, it almost always is....
  3. Elliott was disarmingly bright, according to everyone who knew him, an avid reader of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Stendhal, Freud, the Buddha, all of whom destabilized notions of identity. I think he knew how little we know about who we are. The idea comes through in...
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