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From Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower:

The feel­ing I had hap­pened when Sam told Patrick to find a sta­tion on the radio. And he kept get­ting com­mer­cials. And com­mer­cials. And a really bad song about love that had the word “baby” in it. And then more com­mer­cials. And finally he found this really amaz­ing song about this boy, and we all got quiet.

Sam tapped her hand on the steer­ing wheel. Patrick held his hand out­side the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song fin­ished, I said something.

“I feel infinite.”

I’m think­ing about rain­bows, and how there’s really no appro­pri­ate way to talk about them. One could talk sci­en­tif­i­cally, artis­ti­cally, emo­tion­ally, instinc­tively, or even reli­giously. On their own, none of these approaches seems suf­fi­cient, and put all together, they seem even cheaper. Talk­ing about a rain­bow doesn’t match see­ing one. And see­ing a rain­bow is never just see­ing a rain­bow. See­ing a rain­bow is accom­pa­nied by the smell, and the sound of quiet, and the cool feel­ing in the air after the rain. I can­not cri­tique a rain­bow, because a rain­bow, and the con­di­tions under which I expe­ri­ence it, makes me feel infinite.

Any­way, if you don’t like rain­bows, you can prob­a­bly sub­sti­tute some­thing else, like a full moon or the sound of cicadas or the way a new­born baby smells.

How does Destroyer’s Rubies (2006) start off per­fectly, and still man­age to feel like it keeps mak­ing progress through­out? A few min­utes into the first track, I think that if Rubies was just “Rubies,” I’d be okay with it. Then, that song ends, and “Your Blues” begins, and every other song fol­lows them, and even though I don’t think any song is bet­ter than these two, the album some­how gets bet­ter and bet­ter. I don’t under­stand this.

I think I under­stand one thing about Destroyer’s Rubies very well. I think I under­stand why I never want to lis­ten to it all over again after “Sick Priest Learns To Last For­ever” fades out. I think it’s because the album is beau­ti­fully com­plete and whole and sat­is­fy­ing. It’s like leav­ing the table after a per­fect din­ner; it was great, but the last thing I want to do now is eat again.