...

"It is only here, in solitude, that I might come to myself and become conscious of myself. For since that panic fear which overcame me that time, all I have tried has been to avert my eyes and close my ears. — If I am to find the way back to myself again, I must surrender to the horrors of loneliness. But fundamentally I am only speaking in riddles, for you do not know what has been and still is going on in me; but it is certainly not that hypochondriac fear of death, as you suppose. I had already realized that I shall have to die. But without trying to explain or describe you something for which there are perhaps no words at all, I’ll just tell you that at a blow I have simply lost all the clarity and quietude I ever achieved... and now at the end of life am again a beginner who must find his feet."

(Gustav Mahler, letter to Bruno Walter, July 1908)