"What is that noise?
The wind under the door."

from "The Waste Land" T.S. Eliot


The door of the room in an old hotel I stayed at many years ago let the light in from the hallway through the gap around it. With the lights out in the room, the door looked like a rectangular total eclipse. Whenever someone opened the door to the stairwell at the other end of the hall, the rush of air it created through the gap made a low, lonesome sound in the room. I was reminded of this when I read those lines from "The Waste Land". I thought of all the people who had been in that room listening to that sound, and how they are gone now. That room is gone now too.

All art has the elegiac about it. Sometimes it is barely felt but at other times, it rushes in from something that's just been opened.