[Phoenix1010]

"The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or two and perused the pages of old books. I had had pains for two hours, as elderly people do. I had taken a powder and been very glad when the pains consented to disappear. I had lain in a hot bath and absorbed its kindly warmth. Three times the mail had come with undesired letters and circulars to look through. I had done my breathing exercises, but found it convenient today to omit the thought exercies. I had been for an hour's walk and seen the loveliest feathery cloud patterns penciiled against the sky. That was delightful. So was the reading of the old books. So was the lying in the warm bath. But, taken all in all, it had not been exactly a day or rapture. No, it had not even been a day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days when I calmly wonder, obective and fearless, whether it isn't time to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have an accident while shaving."

Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf