Music at night

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Aldous Huxley Music at Night
(fragmento) Traducción de Mariana Alonso Moonless, this June night is all the more alive with stars. Its darkness is perfumed with faint gusts from the blossominglime trees, with the smell of wetted earth and the invisible greenness of the vines.There is silence; but a silence that breathes with the soft breathing of the sea and, in the thin shrill noise of acricket, insistently, incessantly harps on the fact of its own deep perfection. Far away, the passage of a train is like a long caress, moving gently, with an inexorable gentleness, across the warmliving body of the night. Music, you say;it would be a good night for music. But I have music here in a box, shut up like one of those bottled djinns in the Arabian Nights, and ready at a touch to breakout of its prison. I make the necessary mechanical magic, and suddenly, by some miraculously appropriate coincidence (for I had selected the record in the dark, without knowing what music the machinewould play), suddenly the introduction to the Benedictus in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis begins to trace its patterns on the moonless sky. The Benedictus. Blessed and blessing, this music is in somesort the equivalent of the night, of the deep and living darkness, into which, now in a single jet, now in a fine interweaving of melodies, now in pulsing and almost solid clots of harmonious sound,itpours itself, stanchlessly pours itself, like time, like the rising and the falling, falling trajectories of a life. It is the equivalent of the night in another mode of being, as an essence is theequivalent Sin luna, esta noche estrellada de junio tiene aún más vida. Su oscuridad está perfumada con leves ráfagas de los tilos en flor, con el olor a tierra húmeda y el invisible verdor de lasparras. Reina el silencio, pero un silencio que respira con la suave respiración del mar y,en el chirrido de un grillo, insistentemente, incesantemente insiste en el hecho de su absoluta perfección.A lo...