"I'm sitting on a bench...doing what I like best, that is thinking about what I will do once I am free again....When I think about it, all such daydreams have one thing in common: sooner or later, a disturbing question always arises: what then? what next? For the time must come, after all, when - figuratively speaking - I will have swum enough, preened myself enough, eaten enough, slept enough; when I will no longer want to indulge in those delights any more, yet my life will clearly be far from over, and it will be high time - especially after all that - to breathe some meaning and substance into it....
"....When I mentioned a sauna and a good dinner, I deliberately chose the most trivial example...a truly ephemeral pleasure...(though to be truthful, such pleasure is all there is to the meaning of life for many). But the same applies to all the other more substantial joys in life. For example, if I imagine that rare and wonderful moment when I get an idea for a play, and idea so fine and gratifying that it practically knocks me off my chair, and if, in a kind of joyful trance, I imagine actually turning the idea into a play I'm happy with, then having it neatly typed out, reading it to some friends who like, and even finding theaters that express an interest in putting it on - imagining all that, I must also necessarily imagine the moment when it's all over and the awful question comes up again: "Well?" "Is that all?" "What next?" I would even venture to say that the more "serious" and time-consuming the activity that lends meaning to life, the more terrifying the emptiness that follows it."
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