Samuel Beckett, London, 1963. Photo by Dmitri Kasterine.
“Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in
rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous
rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of
water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen
from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes
‘the farce we all must play’. But for an instant – because of a wild
music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax – the very
slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the
outside world: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance,
and the soul then thrills animated by delirious new energies”
―
Alejandra Pizarnik
