Somebody asked me about his [insert German word here], which is the fear of losing one’s soul to the detritus of existence. The kind that hints at the sadness of ideal vs. reality. I’d coincidentally just found my own answer that very afternoon, but it was too wet to show him any wise words. So these are them here:

“He no longer seems to have it in him to produce poetry of the kind he wrote at the age of seventeen or eighteen, pieces sometimes pages long, rambling, clumsy in parts, but daring nonetheless, full of novelties. Those poems, or most of them, came out of a state of anguished being-in-love, as well as out of the torrents of reading he was doing. Now, four years later, he is still anguished, but his anguish has become habitual, even chronic, like a headache that will not go away. The poems he writes are wry little pieces, minor in every sense. Whatever their nominal subject, it is he himself – trapped, lonely, miserable – who is at their centre; yet – he cannot fail to see it – these new poems lack the energy or even the desire to explore his impasse of spirit seriously.

In fact he is exhausted all the time. At his grey-topped desk is the big IBM office he is overcome with gales of yawning that he struggles to conceal; at the British Museum the words swim before his eyes. Al he wants to do is sink his head on his arms and sleep.

Yet he cannot accept that the life he is leading here in London is without plan or meaning. A century ago poets derangd themselves with opium or alcohol so that from the brink of madness they could issue reports on their visionary experiences. By such means they turned themselves into seers, prophets of the future. Opium and alcohol are not his way, he is too frightened of what they might do to his health. But are exhaustion and misery not capable of performing the same work? Is living on the brink of psychic collapse not as good as living on the brink of madness? Why is it a greater sacrifice, a greater extinction of personality, to hide out in a garret room on the Left Bank for which you have not paid the rent, or wander from cafe to cafe, bearded, unwashed, smelly, bumming drinks from friends, than to dress in a black suit and do soul-destroying office-work and submit to either loneliness unto death or sex without desire?… In the romantic era artists went mad on an extravagant scale. Madness poured out of them in reams of delirious verse or great gouts of paint. That era is over: his own madness, if it is his lot to suffer madness, will be otherwise – quiet, discreet. He will sit in a corner, tight and hunched… waiting patiently for his season in hell to pass. And when it has passed he will be all the more stronger for having endured.”
– J.M. Coetzee, “Youth”.