Radiohead
Daydreaming

I left this song to settle for two years. It was necessary. Too beautiful and too difficult, it attracts and repels at the same time. That kind of beauty you're afraid to take in large doses because it hurts a little and always asks something in return, it wears you down a bit. So I always listened to it sparingly because the effort of the journey was equal to or greater than the pleasure I felt.

After two years, something clicked, and I was completely open to this pain in pills, hidden in a spoonful of honey. And I believe I've truly understood the soul of the song, which lies precisely in this paradox: the perfect coexistence of love, dream, light and damage, lack of time, impotence. Until you bend, accepting your functional dimension in relation to someone else, like Prufrock, “glad to be of use.”

It is the perfect image of the fifty-year-old man who has been abandoned by the touch of love, who continues to hope (“Dreamers, they never learn”), but knows that by now it’s too late for new beginnings (“It's too late”), and the path he has taken in his life is now definitive, what’s done is done (“The damage is done”). His love with Rachel is over, but there’s no new opportunity for his life, the legacy of what has been done will always be with him: “Beyond the point of no return.”

But in Daydreaming, shadows and lights intertwine, as if to represent in a single moment the damnation of being in the world and the inexhaustible series of doors that can be opened in life (as in the P. T. Anderson video). But at some point, you no longer act on your will; you’re guided by something else: “This goes beyond me, beyond you.” There are other souls that depend on me and you, we can no longer be selfish. And in the sweet suffering of these words and of music that is enchanted yet also anxious, an image of pure beauty: the sunlight entering through the window, in a white room. A sensory joy, of simply being in the world, certainly not a rational or affective enjoyment.

The affections have worn down Thom, who represents the adult man. So much so that in the end, he finds contentment in just serving, in being helpful to the ex-partner, in raising the children well. It is a tombstone and an extreme, unforeseen hope of man in the face of the failure of existence (but not personal, rather the ontological living itself). The damage is done, but life is daydreaming, the plane of reality and that of possibility blend. Daily condemnations and unexpected flashes of beauty coexist in perfect harmony.

And the music says all this, with a hypnotic piano loop, like in the routine of opening endless existential doors, wearing; yet there is so much room for beauty, an austere, composed yet indelible beauty, like a spring that explodes in a few seconds, but almost ashamed of it, avoiding being brazen in its grace. (And this modesty is found a bit throughout the album). Music that illuminates, that conveys precisely the image of a dazzling light, that floods with warmth but blinds, stuns.

And the finale is a twilight, with Thom's wheeze reflecting on his existence, reminding Rachel that they spent half their lives together. To emphasize that he received so much, but gave just as much. Like this song, which while cradling you, poisons you a little, sweetly. And so what is left to do? Take refuge, close yourself in a cave carved in the snow, with a small fire.