“The miracle of an analogy,” he said, using the napkin now to pat the sweat from his forehead. “That’s what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That’s the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you’re alive—the backward ache. That’s what music is. The trouble—for me—is that at some stage I realized those miracles, those aches, they have a history. They’re not private. The music’s always about what someone’s lost. That’s what you hear, when it’s good: the worlds people lost, the ones they want back. And once
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