After a long pause, which I find almost embarrassing, this evening I returned to Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, one of my favorite books. As I am reading about a gypsy orchestra he and some of his friends are listening to in a trendy restaurant on the coast of Normandy, I occasionally hear the music playing half way up the Šubijent Hill to the south of Motovun. This is where the young people from the hilltown and the surrounding villages are celebrating today’s holiday in a large tent erected for this special occasion. The noise surprises me from time to time, but it takes me a while to stop reading, raise my head from the book, and start paying closer attention to it. My house is about two kilometers from the tent as the crow flies, but the music sounds as though it is coming from a house not far down my street. “Lucky Proust,” I mumble to myself at last, “there were no loudspeakers back then.” The only mystery of this story is why the young people need the loudspeakers nowadays. Are they hard of hearing? This is what they will surely become after a few celebrations like the one this evening.