Every­one car­ries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hear­ing. If some­one walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and lis­tens, say in the night, when every­thing round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rat­tling of a mir­ror not quite firmly fas­tened to the wall.

- Franz Kafka, from Blue Octavo Notebooks