“Discovering his own reflection mirrored in the fountain, Goldmund realized that he, like all men, was continuously transforming, slipping away to dissolve finally, while the image created by the artist would remain immutable, unaltered by the passage of time. Perhaps the source of all art and presumably all thoughts is the fear of death. When, as artists, we create forms or, as thinkers, formulate ideas, we do so to succeed nonetheless in saving something from the great dance of death, to fix something that will last longer than ourselves.”

This passage is extracted from Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. Artists are wrestling against temporality. The awareness of our own mortality is the fuel for creative expression. The creative act is humanity's defiant gesture against the flow of time that carries all things toward oblivion. While the human body, objects are subject to decay and dissolution. The sculptor's marble outlasts the sculptor. The impulse to create impermanent forms. All human culture stems from our unique consciousness of mortality.