第219页 The necessity of poetry

Such is the bourgeois, but as you can see, he is not at all the man without eyes or ears of whom we were told; he is merely the man who is not tomrented by "what exists only in the forgetting of what exists," who is not harassed by a mad desire to live as though the luxuries of the mind were a necessity of life itself.
In saying this, I think of my youth. I lived among young people for whom art and poetry were a kind of essential nourishment impossible to forego, and indeed something more: a supernatural food. In those days--some who are still living will remember--we had the urgent impression that a sort of cult or new kind of religion was about to be born, that would give shape to the quasi-mystical state of mind which reigned at that time and which was inspired in or communicated to us by our extremely intense awareness of the universal value of  the emotions of Art.