...of contrast

Eager though he was to go out, he hesitated as usual. He opened the doors to all the rooms on the ground floor, letting the light from different directions fuse. The house seemed uninhabited. He had the impression that, dissatisfied with being only worked in and slept in, it would have liked to be lived in as well. Of that the writer had probably been incapable from the start, as of any family life. He found window seats, dining tables, and pianos upsetting; stereo loudspeakers, chessboards and flower vases, even organised book shelves repelled him - his books tended to pile up on the floor and windowsills. It was only at night, sitting somewhere in the dark, looking out into the rooms, which to his taste were sufficiently illuminated by the city lights and their reflection in the sky, that he almost had a sense of being at home. At last he had no need to ponder and plan, but just sat there quietly in the silence, at the most remembering; these were the hours when he was happiest in the house, and he always prolonged them until, imperceptibly, his musings merged into equally peaceful dreams. In the daytime, however, especially just after work, he soon found silence oppressive. Then the splashing of the dishwasher in the kitchen or the hum of the dryer in the bathroom - if possible, both at once - came as a relief. Before even getting up from his desk, he needed the sounds of the outside world. Once, after months of writing in an almost sound-proof room in a high-rise building, close to the sky as it were, he had moved, in order to go on working, to a street-level room on a noisy traffic artery, and later, in the present house, though the construction noises next door had disturbed him at first, he had soon got used to hearing the din of the jackhammers and bulldozers every morning, very much as in the beginning he had played rock music to ease himself into work. From time to time, he would take his eyes off his paper, look out at the workers, and try to establish a harmony between what he was doing and their unhurried one-thing-after-another. He often needed a confrontation of this kind, which nature - the trees, the grass, the Virginia creeper twined around his window - could not in the long run provide. Be that as it may, a fly in the room disturbed him a lot, more than a pile driver outside.

[The Afternoon of a Writer, Handke, P.]