Faith & Spirit Quote by Richard Schickel

A “soul under perpetual migraine attack” is criticism that refuses to be polite. Schickel isn’t diagnosing a headache; he’s naming a temperament: someone whose inner life is stuck in the worst kind of sensory overload, where every stimulus feels like glare and every feeling arrives at maximum volume. The phrase works because it yokes the metaphysical (“soul”) to the brutally bodily (“migraine”), collapsing any romantic idea of suffering into something nauseating, claustrophobic, and chronic. It’s not the noble melancholy of poets; it’s the punishing throb of a mind that can’t dim the lights.

Schickel, a writer-critic by trade, often treated culture as a stress test for sincerity. In that context, the line reads like a surgical review of a public figure or character whose drama is less chosen than endured. “Perpetual” is the knife twist: this isn’t a passing crisis or a phase; it’s an identity built around irritation, grievance, hyper-sensitivity, and the exhaustion that follows. The subtext hints at a modern pathology too: a psyche marinated in constant input, where outrage and pain become both lens and performance.

There’s also an implicit judgment hiding in the sympathy. Calling it a migraine grants legitimacy to suffering; calling it perpetual suggests a self-perpetuating loop, a person who can’t or won’t step out of the dark room. Schickel’s intent is to make the reader feel the condition viscerally - then decide whether it deserves compassion, distance, or dread.