music clip of the day

Turn it off: cellphone, email, Twitter—the whole modern rot.

Let this, and nothing else, surround you.

Frederic Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat major, Op. 27, No. 2
Martha Argerich (piano), live, Germany (Saarbrücken), 1972

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

In the right hands there are no notes—only mysteries.

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reading table

Then I considered the spiritual bread that a newspaper constitutes, still warm and moist as it emerges from the press and the morning mist in which it has been delivered at crack of dawn to the housemaids who take it to their masters with a bowl of milk, this miraculous loaf, multiplied ten-thousandfold and yet unique, which stays unchanged for everyone while proliferating across every threshold.

—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (translated from French by Peter Collier)