Music Motif

Dores uses her knowledge of music to connect it to one’s inner life. She claims that “there is a gap between our reality and our desires,” and that when she and Vinicius made music together, they “forgot the world and were lost inside [their] songs,” connecting that gap (158). She taps into what she perceives as human suffering and uses music as the vehicle by which to overcome this. Dores outright defines music as a disembodied experience: “the music in our minds can do anything” (303). It is unbound by the physical world and instead is the “deepest parts of our imaginations” (303). She describes this place as “only feeling, and the exhilaration of feeling,” nothing definitive and definable (303). Despite this, there is solace in defining music itself, creating some order of expectation and “names [that] bring us comfort” (436). This is connected to her traumatic experience in...