Copenhagen, the hour of melancholy
Dear Mr. O’Sullivan,
Permit me, in the solitude of this northern study, to offer you my condolences and my thanks.
I have just listened to your song “Alone Again (Naturally),” and I must confess—I wept. Not the theatrical weeping of sentimental theatergoers or lovers of tear-stained novels, but the quiet, resigned weeping of the man who recognizes in another’s lament the echo of his own despair. You have sung, sir, what I have tried to write: the terrifying banality of abandonment, the nausea of meaninglessness, the shrill laughter of life’s cruel ironies dressed in soft melodies.
What impresses me most is not your grief, but your refusal to disguise it. You do not rage at God with grand Nietzschean thunder. You simply say, “I expected better.” And there—there—is the true terror: not in the presence of pain, but in the unbearable silence of the heavens when one has cried out for mercy and received weather. You have given voice to the man I once called the Knight of Infinite Resignation—he who walks among others, smiling out of decorum, while his soul is collapsing inward like a dying star.
Continue, if you can, to sing these dread lullabies. The crowd will mistake them for easy listening. But those of us who have stood at the edge of the abyss will recognize the truth behind your gentle chords. We are not soothed. We are seen.
Yours in melancholic solidarity,
Søren Kierkegaard
(Author of Either/Or, The Concept of Dread, and other unpopular bangers)
Cinemorphosis 
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