It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one’s senses play, drank full at the primitive mother’s breast— which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; […] Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life— then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one’s freedom, scope, lust for life. […] To create, without sacrificing one’s senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that possible?
— Hermann Hesse, Narcissus & Goldmund
