"What If What You Do to Survive Kills the Things You Love?"

I remember that while still a child I liked to empty my pockets into those of the poor; I remember the smile with which they would greet me as I came by and the pleasure l took in doing them good. It is a pleasure that I have not experienced for a long time - for now I have a hard heart, my tears have dried up. But woe to the men who have made me corrupt and savage, when once I was kind and pure!

Woe to that aridity of civilization that parches and withers everything that grows in the sunshine of poetry and the glow of the heart! That old corrupt society which has been so seductive and so crafty, that old grasping Jew will die from emaciation and exhaustion on those heaps of manure he calls his treasures, without a poet to sing of his death, without a priest to close his eyes, without gold for his mausoleum, for he will have squandered it all on his vices.