"There is so much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain or pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contenment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepresible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. For what I hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity."
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
