The mouleur, whose shop I pass every day, has hung two plaster masks beside his door.  The face of the young drowned woman, which they took a cast of in the morgue, because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively, as if it knew.  And beneath it, his face, which knows.  That hard knot of senses drawn tightly together.  That inexor­able self-condensing of a music continually trying to evaporate.  The countenance of a man whose hearing a god had closed up, so that there might be no sounds but his own; so that he might not be led astray by what is turbid and ephemeral in noises -- he who knew in himself their clarity and permanence.  So that only the soundless senses might carry the world in to him, silently, a world in suspense, waiting, unfinished, before the creation of sound.
    World-consummator:  as that which comes down as rain over the earth and upon the waters, falling care­lessly, at random, inevitably rises again, invisible and joyous, out of all things, and ascends and floats and forms the heavens:  so our precipitations rose out of you, and vaulted the world with music.
    Your music:  it could have encircled the whole uni­verse; not merely us.  A grand-piano could have been built for you in the Theban desert, and an angel would have led you to that solitary instrument, through mountain-ranges in the wilderness, where kings are buried and courtesans and anchorites.  And he would have flung himself up and away, for fear that you would begin.
    And then you would have streamed forth un­heard, giving back to the universe what only the universe can endure.  Bedouins in the distance would have galloped by, superstitiously; but merchants would have flung themselves to the ground at the edges of your music, as if you were a storm.  Only a few solitary lions would have prowled around you at night, in wide circles, afraid of themselves, menaced by their own excited blood.
    For who will now take you out of ears that are lascivious?  Who will drive them from the concert halls, these corrupted ears whose sterile hearing forni­cates and never conceives, as the semen spurts out onto them and they lie beneath it like whores, play­ing with it; or it falls onto the ground like Onan's, while they writhe in their abortive pleasures.
    But, Master, if some pure spirit with a virgin ear were to lie down beside your music:  he would die of bliss; or he would become pregnant with infinity, and his fertilized brain would explode with so much birth.