"... there are limits to everything. In all this time something definitive should have been achieved. But it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren't at home in anything but change and turmoil: that's their native element; they aren't happy with anything that's less than on a world scale. For them, transitional periods, works in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren't trained for anything else, they don't know about anything except that. And do you know why there is this incessant whirl of never-ending preparations? It's because they haven't any real capacities, they are ungifted. Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself -- the gift of life -- is such a breathtakingly serious thing! Why substitute this childish harlequinade of adolescent fantasies, these schoolboy escapades?"
-- Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago (1958), p. 292
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