"He blamed the handful of books he'd read as a young man, which convinced him life only had value experienced at a certain level of possibility. He hungered for that sense of infinite promise. If only we can hope to climb ever upward, we have our reason for moving. It wasn't the ladder of material success he schemed to scale- Lev wanted something more boyish: to search for a grail that would give meaning to everything that came before. Without it the deserts of dailiness weren't worth the trouble and the past was a trousseau of dust."
from Ambassador to the Dead by Askold Melnyczuk