Quoted By:
Man loves construction and the laying out of roads, that is indisputable. But how is it that he is so passionately disposed to destruction and chaos? Tell me that! But on this subject I should like to put in two words of my own. Doesn’t his passionate love for destruction and chaos (and nobody can deny that he is sometimes devoted to them; that is a fact), arise from his instinctive fear of attaining his goal and completing the building he is erecting? For all you know, perhaps it is only from a distance that he likes the building, and from close to he doesn’t like it at all; perhaps he only likes building it, not living in it, and leaves it afterwards aux animaux domestiques, such as ants, sheep, etc. Ants’ likes and dislikes are quite different. They have remarkable buildings of the same sort, that remain eternally undestroyed – anthills. All respectable ants begin with the ant-hill, and they will probably end with it too, which does great credit to their constancy and their positive character. But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself. And who knows, (nobody can say with certainty), perhaps man’s sole purpose in this world consists in this uninterrupted process of attainment, or in other words in living, and not specifically in the goal, which of course must be something like twice two is four, that is, a formula; but after all, twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. At least, man has always feared this 2 × 2 = 4 formula
