This morning I decided to take the T to Back Bay rather than bike in the rain. I was glad I did when I got to Davis and there was a young violinist playing a csárdás on the platform. We have some uncommonly good buskers at Davis Square on any given day (though the Frenchman's gotten a bit strident lately for my taste), but there was something about this kid, and Vittorio Monti's "Csárdás,"* which he was playing, that transported me instantly to another place and time. Which is better than I can say for the T.

So I gave the kid a buck, because, frankly, that's what you want in the subway is transportation.

While I was there he never got past the lassú—or slow bits—of the piece. And the pace and acoustics added to the general mood of lugubriousness in the beginning that's supposed to give way to exuberance in the end.

What is lovely about "Csárdás" is that it evokes not only another place and time, but an attitude toward life so different from, and a personality so at odds with our own. It was jarring to hear it in the subway surrounded by morning commuters wrapped up in the seriousness and self-importance of a zombified existence.

Of course, that's not entirely fair to say. And there I was among the undead myself. I don't claim to be unaffected by the soul-numbing nature of our day-to-day relations. But there are moments when something pokes or pinches or pierces you, and you realize you've been nodding off and only dreaming that you were awake. And this csárdás this morning was one such moment for me.

And when that happens, you look around and you notice how people all around you are in their own dreams, too. And sometimes someone looks back at you like, "are you awake or asleep?" And you realize, Oh, I've been nodding off again.

Which is fine. Sometimes the dream-life beats the waking one hands-down. But other times, when your bubble's burst, and you find yourself suddenly standing on a subway platform, savoring the overripe melancholy and dizzying abandon of a Hungarian csárdás, it's indescribably good to be awake and alive.

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*This version of the piece I found on Youtube is the closest I could find to the mood in Davis Square this morning, although the busker's performance was not as virtuosic as Jonathan Lim's is in the clip. But from my perspective at least, a csárdás can be a bit scrappy, and still be very affecting. This is because the csárdás has folk origins. What Monti has done in his "Csárdás" is provide a composite of what was played by Roma in the public houses of Hungary in the 18th and 19th century.