"I repeat," he said, raising a finger lance, while the wineglass continued to tremble in his other hand, "I repeat, that it is our duty, our religious duty to feel. Our feeling, you see, is our manly vigor, which awakens life. Life slumbers. It wants to be awakened, roused to drunk nuptials with divine feeling. Because feeling, young man, is divine. Man himself is divine in that he feels. He is the very feeling of God. God created him in order to feel through him. Man is nothing more than the organ by which God consummates His marriage with awakened and intoxicated life. And if man fails to feel, it is an eruption of divine disgrace, it is the defeat of God's manly vigor, a cosmic catastrphe, a horror that never leave the mind."
-- Mann, Magic Mountain















