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[…]

There is a mysticism in the experience of music, a godless mysticism if you like, which operates in the realm of the senses and which resonates within us and beyond us. Sensate ecstasy. My intuition—it is nothing more than that—is that music, common, shared, everyday music, low or high or somewhere in between, is able, at its best, to describe how we feel and to allow us to feel something more.

Music is able to summon feeling, which can be a joy, but can also be a background fear, sadness or yearning, things deeper than cognition or concepts or consciousness. We might think of this as participation in what Julian [of Norwich] calls “kindly substance,” an empathy which is beyond words but perhaps their precondition. Music—and this is its miracle, which is why life without music would be a mistake, as Nietzsche insisted—can somehow hold that emotion and hold us there for that moment. And, as [T.S.] Eliot writes, we are the music for as long as the music lasts.”

[Jester deadlifting Fjord in the background]

Found this lurking in my folders lol