<I don’t find music consoling. I’m not sure I even love music. Sometimes I wonder if in fact I hate it, the way one hates a drug, or resents a weakness. It unsettles more than it satisfies, and increases the very appetites it is supposed to sate. At best, it is a distraction from things that are more painful in life. If we confuse its power with consolation, it is through sloppy thinking. (...) We think of music as consoling perhaps because it is so often the handmaiden to religion, amplifying our emotional response to religious ideas. But by itself music, if anything, makes us raw, more susceptible to pain, nostalgia, and memory.>
