“A great idea,” observed Robert Musil in his The Man without Qualities, is typically found in “a kind of molten state, as a result of which the ego enters into infinite expanses and the expanse of the universe enters into the ego, whereby it ceases to be possible to recognize what belongs to oneself and what to the infinite.” No wonder that “at every attempt to get hold of it in cold words it evaporates into nothingness.”
