High winds tonight. Ali Farka Toure. (I have not yet acquired Nora Jones' new album.) Anil's Ghost by M. Ondaatje (181):

A scarf tied around her head holds the earphones to her.
She needs music to push her into extremities of grace.
She wants grace, and it happens here only on these mornings or after a late-
afternoon downpour--when the air is light and cool, when there is also the
danger of skidding on the wet leaves. It feels as if she could eject herself
out of her body like an arrow.

Sarath sees her from the dining room window. He watches a person he has
never seen. A druid in moonlight, a thief in oil. This is not the Anil he knows.
Just as she, in this state, is invisible to herself, though it is the state she longs for.
Not a moth in a man's club. Not the carrier and weigher of bones--she needs that
side of herself too, just as she likes herself as a lover. But now it is herself dancing
to a furious love song that can drum out loss, 'Coming In from the Cold,' dancing the
rhetoric of a lover's parting with all of herself. She thinks she is most sane about
love when she chooses damning gestures against him, against herself, against
them together, against eros the bittersweet, consumed and then spat out in the
last stages of their love story. Her weeping comes easy. It is for her in this state
no more than sweat, no more than a cut foot she earns during the dance, and she
will not stop for any of these, just as she would not change herself for a lover's howl
or sweet grin, then or anymore.

She stops when she is exhausted and can hardly move. She will crouch and lean there,
lie on the stone. A leaf will come down. Its click of applause. The music continues
furious like blood moving for a few minutes in a dead man. She lies under the sound
and witnesses her brain coming back, lighting its candle in the dark. And breathes in
and breathes out and breathes in and breathes out.

*****

A sublime passage. Lovely words/thoughts. I wish I had written them.