It's 10.30 p.m. The rain treads it's drizzly footsteps outside. My eyes tire slightly as they glaze over the last parts of a chapter on the instrumentation of NMR spectroscopy. Suddenly, out of the blackness of the night outside and the plastic yellow of the lightbulb inside, a forgotten but beloved tune comes to my mind and I start humming it. It's one of my favourite tunes, but like that special friend in school who used to accompany you in the rickety old rickshaw, it has silently impregnated itself into the deep recesses of my consciousness and become a part of me, transcending years and moments. Why it should suddenly and spontaneously rise and dance in and out of my rustic awareness, why it should be incident upon my mind like a lost pilgrim, I don't know.

It's Yanni's Nostalgia. Nostalgia with the sweeping and mournful saxophone and violin flourishes. Nostalgia with the soulful strings contras.

But most distinctively, Nostalgia with the signature piano pieces, gloriously standing alone, proudly enshrined in wood and steel, stubbornly beatified in ivory and black. Notes hard to describe in words. But notes like the itinerant but precisely crafted to and fros of the tap dancer. Notes that remind me of recursive functions, of Lorentz attractors, shapes and figures that create order out of apparent disorder, butterflies flying a random walk, with an absurdly nonchalant dart towards a single locus...notes that seem to fire in sync with the neurons in my mind, precisely timed, exquisitely controlled, yet having a whimsical, haphazard life of their own...signal transduction cascades competing with electrical impulses, picoamperes of electron probabilities, neutrotransmitters forever undecided and yet decisive, released and absorbed over crests of voltaic waves, instantly transported over quantum steps of synaptic junctions, bursting out in poofs of memory and networks, pausing, disappearing in a flurry of nothingness, and reappearing that very instant over places frozen in space but seemingly ethereal in time...

The audience applauds. Time to go home. Some pieces of music just don't last forever.