everywhere...

"everywhere there was the same white play of reflections from the empty plain, a feverish flicker sliding through this little town that was cut off from all reality. before the houses there lay high banks of snow. the air was clear and dry. it was still snowing a little, but the flakes were falling thinly - flat, almost shriveled, glittering little scales - as it it might stop soon. here and there, from above the shut doors of the houses, windows looked down into the street with a bright blue glassy gaze, and the ground underfoot rang like glass too. sometimes a piece of hard, frozen snow crashed down through a gully, tearing a jagged hole in the stillness. and suddenly the wall of a house would glow in rosy light, or in delicate canary-yellow...

then all claudine did seemed oddly heightened, more intensely alive: and in the hushed silence of all things visible seemed to light one another up, as it were echoing one another in a larger visibility. and then it would all withdraw into itself again and in meaningless streets the houses were like little groups of mushrooms in the woods, or like a thicket of wind-bent shrubs on a wide plane, while she still felt a dizziness and an immensity beyond. there was in her some kind of fire, some burning, bitter fluid, and while she walked and mused, she seemed to herself a huge, mysterious vessel that was being carried through the streets - a thin-walled flaming vessel".

robert musil, the perfecting of a love - from selected writings