Czapski: a trial every creative being must endure.

The slow and painful transformation of a passionate and narrowly egotistical being into a man who gives himself over wholly to some great work or other that devours him, destroys him, lives in his blood, is a trial every creative being must endure.

• Jozef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectres on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp (2018)