My concertising was only the blindest sort of speculation

"I came to see myself as someone who was playing an organ whose music I couldn't hear; the sound was coming out of pipes in a distant room in another building. I knew nothing about performing on this instrument or any other, but I had been ordered to play for my life, and so I played, by intuition, seeing a likely combination of keys to strike and striking it. I'd wait and someone would rush in from the other building and exclaim, 'Oh, what beautiful music!' I quickly gained confidence and let each impulse growing within me translate itself into action, and never was I wrong. Of course I realised that my concertising was only the blindest sort of speculation and that at any moment if I attempted to execute a new fancy, I might produce a disastrous sound. I never did. The messengers always came in saying it was beautiful - and I never heard a not of it ..."   

- Edmund White, Forgetting Elena