If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house. It’s the clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you. It’s a wordless song, for the most, but it’s a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, Jon McGregor