[A] life full of goals and end-points is like trying to abate one's hunger by eating merely the two precise ends of a banana. The concrete reality of… - Alan Watts

If, then, we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures.

we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view. Whitehead’s criticism of traditional education is applicable to our whole way of living: We are too exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine.… In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.1

There is more in this beauty than the succession of melodious images, and the theme of dissolution does not simply borrow its splendor from the things dissolved. The truth is rather that the images, though beautiful in themselves, come to life in the act of vanishing.