In general, whenever human history darkens, this impulse—to obscure meaning, to flatten affect, to don expressive masks—emerges. Chaos erupts, entropy spreads, mistrust multiplies. There’s some occult math at work: Overturn enough treasured assumptions at a proper velocity, and we will begin to doubt even our most basic impulses.

Everyone is “dissociating.” Over the past few years, it’s become an open-source cultural term, ripe for applying (or misapplying) to all kinds of circumstances where people feel the need to turn off and tune out.

Music is perhaps the most obvious vessel for this melancholy richness, because music (unlike a painting) is inseparable from transience, in that it moves through time. Where the myriad distractions and addictions of life offer us pleasure and short-term happiness, melancholy gives sadness a place to comfortably sit. J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites, the A

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