I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmit… - Thomas Mann

Asien verschlingt uns. Wohin man blickt: tatarische Gesichter.

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

We come out of darkness and return to darkness, with some experiences in between. But we don’t experience the beginning and the end, birth and death. We are not subjectively aware of them, they exist only in the world of objective events — and that’s that.