There is a wonderful stillness here. Especially I love the evenings, when I linger on my verandah and revel in the complete absence of all sound. That is strange, you will say; how can one enjoy sound that is absent, or indeed anything that does not exist! But if you were a musician perhaps you too would be permitted to hear, in the night stillness a sound, as though the earth in its flight through space intoned a deep bass note.
Pyotr Illych Tchaikovsky,
To My Best Friend: Correspondence Between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck
