"With his hands clasped in his lap he let his eyes swim in the wideness of the sea, his gaze lose focus, blur, and grow vague in the misty immensity of space. His love of the ocean had profound sources: the hard-worked artists's longing for rest, his yearning to seek refuge from the thronging manifold shapes of his fancy in the bosom of the simple and vast; and another lure, for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal -- in short, for nothingness. He whose preoccupation is with excellence longs fervently to find rest in perfection; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?"
From Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (translation by Helen Tracey Lowe-Porter)
I'm not going to the ocean. But I am off to the lake.
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