"On certain fine days it was so cold, one was in such extensive communication with the street outside, that it was as if the walls of the house had been wrenched apart, and each time the tram passed, its note sounded out as if a silver knife were striking a house made of glass. But it was above all inside myself that I heard with delight a new sound struck from the inner violin. Its strings are tightened or slackened by simple variations in temperature, in exterior light. With our being, that instrument which the uniformity of habit has reduced to silence, melody springs from these changes, these variations, which are the source of all music: the weather on particular days makes us move immediately from one note to another. We hear once more the forgotten tune whose mathematical necessity we could have worked out, and which, for the first few moments, we sing without recognising it. Only these inner changes (though they came from outside) brought the outer world alive again for me. Connecting doors, long walled up, were opening again in my brain. The life of certain towns, the gaiety of certain promenades took their place within me again. With my whole being trembling around the vibrating string, I would have given my dreary past life and all my life to come, both rubbed flat by the eraser of habit, to prolong this peculiar state."
Marcel Proust - The Prisoner (1923), translated by Carol Clark
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