The Train in the Night is a memoir not quite like any other. From the morning Nick Coleman woke up to find that he couldn’t hear, it is an account of one man’s struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion in life – and to go one step further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music.
Of all our relationships with art, the one we enjoy with music is the most complex, the most mysterious and, for reasons that cannot be explained by science alone, the most emotionally charged. Nothing about that relationship is simple. And yet it is perhaps through music that we make the most intimate contact with our sense of who we really are, at our most naked, unsophisticated, honest, and simplified.