Music can grip us with the energy of a religious conversion. Once it is heard, one never experiences the world in quite the same way

From On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy by Simon Critchley, loc 214: [my emphasis]

By “music” here, I simply mean the music that you love, popular music, unpopular music, the music that made you feel most alive when you first heard it and which you cherish for a lifetime. And there is more sweet music we can hear if we keep our ears open, music which allows access to many more lifetimes than we have at our disposal. Music can grip us with the energy of a religious conversion. Once it is heard, one never experiences the world in quite the same way. There is a mysticism in the experience of music, a godless mysticism if you like, which operates in the realm of the senses and which resonates within us and beyond us. Sensate ecstasy. My intuition – it is nothing more than that – is that music, common, shared, everyday music, low or high or somewhere in between, is able, at its best, to describe how we feel and to allow us to feel something more.

Which immediately made me think back to discovering ska punk in my early 20s, specifically the almost overwhelming sense of being alive which this music did (and sometimes still can) provoke in me. The ecstasy, to use Critchley’s term, clearly depended on being a pit though which simply stopped feeling safe once I got glasses 🤓😢