Hence the longing for liberation and the yearning for expanse, a perilous “palpitating Sehnsucht and craving of the heights, of the beyond.” But this longing has another distinctive symptom: the consciousness of its hopelessness, the clear conviction that the passionately-desired goal is but an idée fixe. In this longing is expressed a spirit that ruins everything in itself with the corrosive acid of reason, a spirit that had long lost faith in itself, that considers its own activity diffidently and critically, a spirit that spies and searches itself, that has lost the faculty of taking itself seriously, that has become accustomed to mock itself and to play with its own manifestations as with a ball; a spirit not satisfied with the highest and finest human perceptions, that has come at last, after many searchings, to the gloomy decision that all is in vain, that it is incapable of surpassing itself. Hence the pursuit of enjoyment. But this morbid seeking of enjoyment lacks that direct, self-sufficient bliss that results from the accumulated surplus of productive strength. The modern Individuum is deprived of that healthy instinct, therefore in place of naive joy experienced from the liberation of surcharged power he plunges into self-forgetfulness. All his life is reduced to pure self-narcotization. In the morbid straining of his abnormally-functioning nerves the Individuum-decadent rises to those mysterious borders where the joy and the pain of human existence pass into one another and intermingle, where the two are brought in their extreme manifestations to a peculiar feeling of destructive rapture, to an ecstatic being outside and above himself. All his thoughts and acts acquire a character of something devastating, maniacal, and over all of them reigns a heavy, depressing, wearying atmosphere, like the one before the outbreak of a storm, something akin to the passionate tremor of delirious impotence, something similar to the consumptive flush of spiritual hysteria. In such clinical terms Przybyszewski sees the modern homo sapiens. Through this prism I perceive his Falk, doomed to utter failure and futility. * * * * *