All day, we felt a strong need to listen to this particular song. It’s euphoric and joyful, with a chorus that rises to sublime heights. That’s not quite been our dominant mood over the last few hours, but the song is helping out our tentative inclinations to hope and courage. It is strengthening the best sides of our nature. Like an amplifier with its signal, music doesn’t invent emotion; it takes what is there in us and makes it louder. By finding the right piece of music at the right time we’re adding an accompanying score to our lives that allows our own best reactions to be more prominent and secure. We end up feeling the emotions that are our due. We can live according to what we actually need to feel.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a normal person in search of a holiday will enjoy skiing; they will delight in bracing mountain air, thrill at going down mogul dotted slopes and feel pleasantly exhausted after a day of parallel turns. This assumption about pleasure joins a host of others proposed by the modern world. Normal people will equally enjoy white wine, the Amalfi coast, the novels of Margaret Atwood, dogs, high heels, small children, Miami beach, oral sex, Banksy, marriage, Netflix and vegetarianism. We may legitimately delight in all of these elements; the issue lies in the immense pressure we are under to do so. The truth about ourselves may, in reality, be a great deal more mysterious than the official narrative allows. Whatever our commitments to decorum and good order, we may in our depths be far more distinctive than we’re supposed to be. We may — once we become sensitive to our faint tremors of authentic delight and boredom — hate the idea of jogging, the the...

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