...of dreaming

Clemente Colling was known to us "The organist at the church of Los Vascos" of "The blind man who plays for the Basques," etc. His reputation was based on that. Some time before our meeting I'd been taken to a piano concert he gave at the Verdi Institute. It was one of the first concerts I ever attended. My enthusiasm and my mania for arriving at performances far too early put us at the door of the concert hall long before it opened. Later, leaning on the balustrade of the upper tier, I began to feel the dreaming of silence that sets in before a concert, when there is still a long time to go before the start and the first whisperings and dry scrapings of chairs deepens the silence, when you are waiting to listen, but there is more to see than to hear, and the spirit, without knowing it, works as it waits, works almost as if in a dream, letting things come, waiting for them and watching them with profound, child-like distraction; when you make a sudden effort to imagine what is to come and scrutinise the program for the hundredth time; when you review your life and your illusions venture forth, and you feel the anguish of having no place anywhere in the world and vow to achieve a place for yourself; when you dream of someday attracting the attention of others and feel a certain sad resentment because you haven't yet done so; when you lose all common sense and dream a future that makes your scalp tingle and numbs your hair, a future you would never confess to anyone because you see yourself all too clearly: and this is the innermost secret of anyone who has any modesty - and it may be the deepest part of the aesthetic sense of life - for when you don't know what you are capable of, then you don't know, either, if your dream is mere vanity or if it is pride.

[Around the Time of Clemente Calling from Lands of Memory, Hernadez, F.]