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Aug. 5th, 2009 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prismakaosQuote from Nick Hornby's book High Fidelity:
"But I find myself worrying away at that stuff about pop music again, whether I like it because I'm unhappy, or whether I'm unhappy because I like it. [...] I've spent nearly thirty years listening to people singing about broken hearts, and has it helped me any? Has it fuck. So maybe what I said before, about how listening to too many records messes your life up ... maybe there's something in it after all. [...] It seems to be that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship."
It's been somewhat stuck in my head for this entire week, due perhaps to my awareness of just how much listening to music or reading books changes my mood. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I can shrug off personal responsibility for how I feel onto media that I consume, as it seems a little petulant.
"But I find myself worrying away at that stuff about pop music again, whether I like it because I'm unhappy, or whether I'm unhappy because I like it. [...] I've spent nearly thirty years listening to people singing about broken hearts, and has it helped me any? Has it fuck. So maybe what I said before, about how listening to too many records messes your life up ... maybe there's something in it after all. [...] It seems to be that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship."
It's been somewhat stuck in my head for this entire week, due perhaps to my awareness of just how much listening to music or reading books changes my mood. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I can shrug off personal responsibility for how I feel onto media that I consume, as it seems a little petulant.
