Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Panic attacks serve as confirmation of the very things women spend their lives working to negate: suspicions of female silliness, stupidity, hysteria. Panic attacks involve the removal of the mind’s control over the body, and in this way are aftershocks of an earlier mind-body separation—the moment when adolescent girls realize that no amount of brains or charm will save them from life in the body.

All of these people doing this complex, gorgeous work, all to produce a few notes that ring like a call from the sky. It’s enough to make you proud to be a member of the human race, a civilization that could think up such a wonderful process, a process with no value at its end other than the pleasure that sound brings to the human ear. If there is a true definition of making a living, this is it.