He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity — proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive — a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?
Thomas Mann, German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875–1955)