Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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That which had taken place in me, then, was not only a breach with Wagner--I was suffering from a general aberration of my instincts, of which a mere isolated blunder, whether it were Wagner or my professorship at Bâle, was nothing more than a symptom. I was seized with a fit of impatience with myself; I saw that it was high time that I should turn my thoughts upon my own lot. In a trice I realised, with appalling clearness, how much time had already been squandered--how futile and how senseless my whole existence as a philologist appeared by the side of my life-task. I was ashamed of this false modesty.... Ten years were behind me, during which, to tell the truth, the nourishment of my spirit had been at a standstill, during which I had added not a single useful fragment to my knowledge, and had forgotten countless things in the pursuit of a hotch-potch of dry-as-dust scholarship. To crawl with meticulous care and short-sighted eyes through old Greek metricians--that is what I had come to!... Moved to pity I saw myself quite thin, quite emaciated: realities were only too plainly absent from my stock of knowledge, and what the "idealities" were worth the devil alone knew!
A positively burning thirst overcame me: and from that time forward I have done literally nothing else than study physiology, medicine, and natural science--I even returned to the actual study of history only when my life-task compelled me to. It was at that time, too, that I first divined the relation between an instinctively repulsive occupation, a so-called vocation, which is the last thing to which one is "called" and that need of lulling a feeling of emptiness and hunger, by means of an art which is a narcotic--by means of Wagner's art, for instance. After looking carefully about me, I have discovered that a large number of young men are all in the same state of distress: one kind of unnatural practice perforce leads to another. In Germany, or rather, to avoid all ambiguity, in the Empire,[2] only too many are condemned to determine their choice too soon, and then to pine away beneath a burden that they can no longer throw off.... Such creatures crave for Wagner as for an opiate,--they are thus able to forget themselves, to be rid of themselves for a moment.... What am I saying!--for five or six hours.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.