- A day of dappled seaborne clouds -
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord.Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycolored and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose.
He passed from the trembling bridge on to firm land again.
-Joyce, "A Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
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I had a feeling of enraptured equilibrium as I sensed the musical relationship between the silvery specters of rain and your inclined shoulders, which would give a shudder when you pressed your fingers into the rippling luster. And when I withdrew deep into myself the whole world seemed like that - homogeneous, congruent, bound by the laws of harmony. I myself, you, the carnations, at that instant all became vertical chords on musical staves. I realized that everything in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance: the trees, the water, you...All was unified, equivalent, divine. You got up. Rain was still mowing down the sunlight. The puddles looked like holes in the dark sand, aperatures onto some other heavens that were gliding past underground. On a bench, glistening like Danish china, lay your forgotten raquet; the strings had turned brown from the rain, and the frame had twisted into a figure eight.
- Nabokov, "Sounds"
