A complex bitter-sweet composition of emotions will thrill everyone when produced by a narrative but its equivalent in music will only affect a small minority. In the first case it is linked to the 'promise of happiness' to a forward-looking identification with time. In the second case it offers the possibility of exactly the opposite, of a detachment from all such promises through the experience of their formation and dissolution as nothing but structures in time. This is essentially Schopenhauer's esthetics; identifying with a narrative as a seduction of the will which gains power through the clarification of wishes. In the other case the will is defeated by being seen at its work in a reducing mirror.