The piano was hammering glinting note heads into a wall of air. Although the origin of this process was entirely real, the walls of the room soon disappeared, and there arose in their place golden partitions of music, that mysterious space in which self and world, perception and feeling, inside and outside, plunge into one another in the most indefinable way, while the space itself consists entirely of sensation, certainty, precision, a whole hierarchy of ordered detail of glory. It was to these sensual details that the threads of feeling were fastened, spun from the billowing haze of their souls, and this haze was mirrored in the precision of these walls of sound and appeared clear to itself. The two players’ souls hung like cocoons in these threads and rays…
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~ Text: Robert Musil, from “Clarisse and her Demons” in The Man Without Qualities
