One's born and at once one is guilty.

     'Look, there's Brahms. He is striving for redemption, but it will take him all his time.'
     I realized that the thousands of men in black were the players of all those notes and parts of his scores which according to divine judgement were superfluous.
     'Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted,' Mozart said with a nod.
     And thereupon we saw Richard Wagner marching at the head of a host just as vast, and felt the pressure of those thousands as they clung and closed upon him. Him, too, we watched as he dragged himself along with slow and sad step.
     'In my young days,' I remarked sadly, 'these two musicians passed as the most extreme contrasts conceivable.'
     Mozart laughed.
     'Yes, that is always the way. Such contrasts, seen from a little distance, always tend to show their increasing similarity. Thick orchestration was in any case neither Wagner's nor Brahms's personal failing. It was a fault of their time.'
     'What? And have they got to pay for it so dearly?' I cried in protest.
     'Naturally. The law must take its course. Until they have paid the debt of their time it cannot be known whether anything personal to themselves is left over to stand to their credit.'
     'But they can't either of them help it!'
     'Of course not. They cannot help it either that Adam ate the apple. But they have to pay for it.'
     'But this is frightful.'
     'Certainly. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty. You must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not know that.'
     I was now thoroughly miserable. I saw myself as a dead-weary pilgrim, dragging myself across the desert of the other world, laden with the many superfluous books I had written, and all the articles and feuilletons; followed by the army of compositors who had had the type to set up, by the army of readers who had had it all to swallow. My God—and over and above it all there was Adam and the apple, and the whole of original sin. All this, then, was to be paid for in endless purgatory. And only then could the question arise whether, behind all that, there was anything personal, anything of my own, left over; or whether all that I had done and all its consequences were merely the empty foam of the sea and a meaningless ripple in the flow of what was over and done.

—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf