A dreary sense of loneliness came over him as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and from the old days seemed to fall away … - Jens Peter Jacobsen

So Niels grows up, and all the influences of his childhood work on the plastic clay. Everything helps to shape it; everything is significant, the real and the dreamed, what is known and what is foreshadowed — all add their touch, lightly but surely, to that tracery of lines which is destined to be first hollowed out and deepened and afterwards flattened out and smoothed away.

He was first of all a philosopher, but not one of the productive philosophers who find new laws and build new systems. He laughed at their systems, the snail-shells in which they dragged themselves across the illimitable field of thought, fondly imagining that the field was within the snail-shell! And these laws — laws of thought, laws of nature! Why, the discovery of a law meant nothing but the fixing of your own limitations: I can see so far and no farther — as if there were not another horizon beyond the first, and another and yet another, horizon beyond horizon, law beyond law, in an unending vista! No, he was not that kind of philosopher.

People close their eyes to real life, they don't want to hear the 'no' it shouts at their wishes, they want to forget the deep chasm it shows them between their longing and what they long for. They want to realize their dreams. But life doesn't take dreams into account, there is not a single obstacle that can be dreamed away from reality, and so in the end they lie there wailing at the chasm, which has not changed but is the same as it has always been. But they themselves have changed for with their dreams they have goaded all their thoughts and inflamed their passions to the highest pitch. Yet the chasm has not grown narrower, and everything in them longs to cross over it. But no, always no, never anything else. And only if they had watched out for themselves in time, but now it is too late, they are unhappy (pp 31)