"This morning in the Avenue du Roule I was just going past the play ground of the college Saint-Croix and onto the series of repair shops and gas stations leading to my own garage when I was all at once rooted to the spot by a long cry that suddenly rose above the hubbub of the children at recess. It was a sustained guttural note of extraordinary purity, like an appeal welling up from the depths of the body, and it ended in a series of modulations at once joyous and moving. It gave an astonishing impression of simultaneous rigor and plenitude, balance and excess. I at once turned back, sure that I’d see something or someone in the playground that was exceptional and astonishing. But no, there was nothing. That crystal note enriched with all the harmonics of the flesh still rang in my ears, and the children just came and went as before, as if that aural miracle had never happened. Which of these little men had drawn forth from himself that pure and happy plaint? To me they all looked equally ordinary i.e. each as essential as the other. I stood there for some time, lulled by the fading echo of the “cry”, which conjured up the memory of St Christopher’s, but which was being gradually drowned and effaced by the manifold, tonic music of the children playing and fighting. Then a bell rang and they lined up to go back into their classroom."
From Michel Tournier's The Ogre
