“I couldn’t get the right tone in the language. All the workday life around me, the loading chants, the noise of the winches, the constant rattling of the iron chains, was incompatible with the moody, self absorbed atmosphere of the Middle Ages, which I desired to be present in my play like a fog.”
How much pride can get in the way of the starving artist’s daily bread. An ascetic young man’s life. Were it not for the brutal Realism of the descriptions we get of his hunger symptoms his life would read like some section out of The Lives of the Saints. But he is dedicated to nothing. He holds onto nothing. He is empty, purged of anything that could make him individual, but also anything that could bring the lofty ideas that he feels owed. Instead of sitting in beautiful contemplation of the mystery of the universe brought about by the emptying of his mind, he sits in shame, vomiting bile into the street, cursing his idiot’s skull that has no grand ideas with which to sate itself.