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... he could not sleep because of his weariness and the noise of the neighborhood, and listened to the heavy carts shaking the walls, and the breathing of the family sleeping below...but when he did at last fall asleep, he was roused unpleasantly at dawn by the voices of his neighbors arguing, and the creaking of a pump worked furiously by someone who was in a hurry to swill the yard and the stairs.
Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe, trans. Gilbert Cannan, Holt,1910, p. 224.
TIME: mid-19th c.
PLACE: a village on the Rhine in Germany
CIRCUMSTANCE: Christophe sleeps
...the crickets chirped under the trees in the cemetery. The bells began to ring; first the highest of them alone, like a plaintive bird, challenging the sky: then the second, a third lower, joined in its plaint: at last came the deepest, on the fifth, and seemed to answer them. The three voices were merged in each other. At the bottom of the towers there was a buzzing, as of a gigantic hive of bees. The air and the boy's heart quivered. Christophe held his breath, and thought how poor was the music of musicians compared with such an ocean of music, with all the sounds of thousands of creatures; the former, the free world of sounds, compared with the world tamed, catalogued, coldly labelled by human intelligence. He sank and sank into that sonorous and immense world without continents or bounds...
Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe, trans. Gilbert Cannan, Holt,1910, p. 237-238.
TIME: mid-19th c.
PLACE: a village on the Rhine in Germany
CIRCUMSTANCE: Jean-Christophe listens to the night
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