solitary_summer | (no subject) (Reply)

Listening to The Fragile after... quite a long time. I haven't had a NIN cd in my player for months, and even now it's curiosity, a way of testing my reaction, rather than any real desire for the music.

There's a certain detachment. Nostalgia, and it's not as if I suddenly have started to dislike the music, but I am no longer the person who could so deeply, wholly identify, and NIN is too emotional to be something I can appreciate only on an abstract aesthetic level; this kind of music (for me at least) doesn't allow for detachment, and I suspect it will always been closely connected to a phase in my life, a level of experience.

Change is a strange thing; to observe part of yourself left behind in the past, experiences losing their cutting edge, their subjective perspective, to be regarded from a objective distance, with an indulgent smile, or a puzzled frown.

And maybe it's a certain reluctance, even fear of... slipping back? that makes me almost unwilling to listen to the Downward Spiral now.

'If I no longer love Diana,' he wrote, 'what shall I do?'

The funny thing (and part of the reason for originally quoting it) is, that a long time ago I remember asking myself the same thing, though with nothing like Stephen's desperate urgency... when I started falling out of fangirlish love with Bowie. The sense, and yes, slight anxiety, of suddenly losing something that has taken up a large part of your emotions, and not being quite sure what to replace it with.

This isn't a question that bothers me any longer; if nothing else, I've learned that live changes, people change, I change, and when it's time you'll be ready to let go of things, and others will move in their places.

Still, there's a kind of faint melancholy...

[I'm blaming the cold flat and resulting pleasant alcoholic haze of a cup of Glühwein if this post should have turned out more pathetic than usual...]