My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present.

-- Hermann Hesse
(in The Glass Bead Game, or, Magister Ludi,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston)