One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science, is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, such men make this cosmos and its construction in the pivot of their emotional life, in ordered to find the peace and the security, which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
I'm mentioning all this -- I'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem; you may think I'm wrong in this, but I think we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew -- about our lives, about our careers -- comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality.