DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXIII

"He wanted to go away, but farther away than an hour's journey towards the mountains. Of the music of Love's Labour's Lost he had written the piano sketch of the expository scenes; but then he had got stuck, the parodistic artificiality of the style was hard to keep up, needing as it did a supply of whimsicality constantly fresh and sustained. He felt a desire for more distant air, for surroundings of greater unfamiliarity. Unrest possessed him. He was tired of the family pension in Rambergtrasse; its privacy had been an uncertain quantity, people could always intrude on it. "I am looking," he wrote to me, "I keep asking round about and hankering for news of a place buried from and untroubled by the world, where I could hold speech alone, with my life, my destiny..." Strange ominous words!"