Season of Mists

-


…once having tasted the lips of excellence, once having given oneself
to its perfection, how dreary and burdensome and filled with anomie
are the remainder of one's waking hours trapped in the shackled lock-step
of the merely ordinary, the barely acceptable, the just okay and not a
stroke better. Sadly, most lives are fashioned on that pattern. Settling for
what is possible; buying into the cliche because the towering dream is out
of stock…
——Harlan Ellison, Introduction, The Sandman: Season of Mists