“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world , except take up exercise, get up early, or be respectable.” So says Lord Henry/Harry, the primary dandy character in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The tragedy of the novel is partly the result of the title character Dorian taking Harry’s cool sarcasm and irony as literal advice.
My topic today is physical exercise, which was mentioned a few weeks back in another blog here (5/13/2020 blog). It is very important in my own life. I can have too much energy sitting still and need to release it by moving about. My body type is either ectomorphic or mesomorphic; I lose weight and get sickly thin in periods of despond or sloth, as my appetite declines without a certain amount of physical exertion each day. A sound mind in a sound body. But people are different this way. My Dad doesn’t get formal physical exercise but is still mentally spry and physically active in his late 80s.
In movies and novels, I thought Christian Bale did a good job showing the way severe weight loss can derive from psychological trauma in The Machinist. I haven’t read it, but Stephen King’s Thinner seems to deal with a similar issue: a man is cursed to drastic weight loss for killing a pedestrian with his car.
I still listen to pop occasionally. When I was a more avid music fan, my taste ran to alternative rock/pop. One of the groups I liked was NIN, whose front man, Trent Reznor, had a serious alcohol and drugs problem in his youth. He seems to have used physical exercise to help get clean, as he went from looking like a long-haired decadent during release of the album The Fragile in 1999 to a to a buff, crew-cut Marine when the subsequent album With Teeth came out in 2004. I think some people turn to the pleasure of endorphins from exercise to replace the fleeting euphoria of drugs.
As for NIN, I think Reznor said about all he had to say lyrically somewhere between With Teeth and his next album Year Zero. His lyrics seem to be intensely about the self and romantic frustration, and there’s only so much to be said about that. He seems to have turned more to film scoring and instrumental music.