The Greeks had a concept, later seized by Goethe, called the daemonic. A daemon is a calling, an obsession, a source of lasting and sometimes manic energy. Daemons are mysterious clusters of energy deep in the unconscious that were charged by some mysterious event in childhood that we imperfectly comprehend—or by some experience of trauma, or by some great love or joy or longing that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture. The daemon identifies itself as an obsessive interest, a feeling of being at home at a certain sort of place, doing a certain activity—standing
