Luigi Pirandello

but also because we no longer live for the sake of living, like these plants, without knowing how to live, but rather for something that is not and which we put there, for something that gives meaning and value to life, a meaning, a value which here, at least in part, we succeed in losing, or of which we recognize the grievous vanity

You feel yourself relaxing, you abandon yourself.

Ah, to be no longer conscious of being, like a stone, like a plant! To remember no longer even one's own name! Stretched out upon the grass, hands interlaced at the back of one's neck, to look up at the dazzling, sun-puffed clouds as they sail past in the blue sky, to listen to the wind which makes, up there in the chestnut grove, a sound like the breaking of the sea.