"Moments come in the hyper-sensitive life of artistic natures, come unbidden and uncaused, when we are assailed by desolate intimations of the inutility of all things, the vanity of our existence, the visionary fabric of the universe, the incomprehensibility of self, the continuous and irreparable flight of time--when our joys and sorrows, our passion and our shame, our endeavours to achieve and our inertia of languor, seem but a mocking film, an iridescent scum upon the treacherous surface of a black and bottomless abyss of horrible inscrutability. At these times, like Pascal, we fain would set a screen up to veil the ever-present gulf that yawns before our physical and mental organs of perceptiion. Alas for those who, feeling the realities of beauty and emotion so acutely having such power at times to render them by words or forms for others, must also feel with poignant intensity the grim and transitory nature of the ground on which we tread, of the flesh that clothes us round, of the desires that fret our brains, the duties we perform, the thoughts that keep our will upon the stretch through months of unremunerative labour.
    It is easy to stigmatise these moods as morbid. It is clear that yielding to them would entail paralysis of energy, decrepitude, disease. It is not certain that recording them serves any useful purpose. Yet they are real, a serious factor in the experience of sentient and reflective personalities. Duly counterpointed by strenuous activity and steady self-effectuation, they constitute for the artist and the thinker what might be compared to a 'retreat' for the religious. They force a man to recognise his own incalculable littleness in the vast sum of things.
    They teach him to set slight store on his particular achievement. They make him understand that seeming-bitter sentence of the Gospel, 'Say, we are unprofitable servants, we have not done that which was our duty to do.' Also they have the minor value of dissipating vain glamours of fame or blame, of popular applause or public condemnation, of vulgar display and petty rivalries with others. Emerging from them, the man, made wiser and saner, proceeds to work at that which lieth nearest to his hand to do."

--John Addington Symonds, in: V*nic* As S**n and D*scrib*d by Famous Writ*rs, ed. *sth*r Singl*ton (1911)

Tr*ndy hijab.