And with his hands folded on his lap, he let his eyes stray at random over the distant reaches of the sea; he let his gaze drift away, grow blurred, glaze over in the monotonous haze of that wilderness of space. He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: because of the hard-working artist’s yearning for repose, his desire to take shelter in the bosom of undifferentiated immensity from the demanding complexity of the world’s phenomena; because of his own proclivity—forbidden, directly counter to his life’s work, and seductive for that very reason—for the unorganized, immoderate, eternal: for
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