What can it be, do you think? A hidden nerve that’s given way? Or something we have failed in or sinned against in ourselves, perhaps — who knows? A … - Jens Peter Jacobsen

I am not offended by your love, Mr.Bigum, but I condemn it. You have done what so many others do. 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 when he began to think of human beings, his soul sickened again. He summoned them in review before him, one by one, and they all passed and left him alone, and not one stayed with him. But how far had he held fast to them? Had he been true? He had only been slower in letting go, that was all. No, it was not that. It was the dreary truth that a soul is always alone. Every belief in the fusing of soul with soul was a lie. Not your mother who took you on her lap, nor your friend, nor yet the wife who slept on your heart ....

But when he had served the god faithfully for eleven days, it sometimes happened that other powers gained the ascendancy over him, and he would be seized with a violent craving for the coarse enjoyment of gross pleasures. Then he would plunge into dissipations, feverish with that human thirst for self-destruction which yearns, when the blood burns as hotly as blood can burn, for degradation, perverseness, filth, and smut, with precisely the measure of strength possessed by another equally human longing, the longing to keep one's self greater than one's self and purer.

In these moments there was but little that was rough and coarse enough for him, and when they had passed, it was long before he could regain his balance; for in truth these excesses were not natural to him; he was too healthy for them, too little poisoned by brooding. In a sense, they came as a rebound from his devotion to the higher spirits of his art, almost like a revenge, as though his nature had been violated by the pursuit of those idealistic aims which choice, aided by circumstances, had made his own.