Essay 1: Schopenhauer and Ocean's "At Your Best (You are Loved)"

The song that I chose for this essay is Frank Ocean's cover of Aaliyah's "At Your Best (You are Loved)". I specifically selected this song in reference to when Schopenhauer writes: "The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain" (264, The World as Will and Representation)

In general, my essay focuses on the ways music, in Schopenhauer's mind, influences the soul. I discuss the ways in which music not only eliminates the potential for suffering through a quieting of individual willing, but also gives the listener true pleasure by the way in which it facilitates a, at least brief, connection to the Will and thus also to one's true self. Connecting this them to the song selected, I discuss its poignant simplicity, candidness and the immersive experience it creates.