Not only had he no ambition for action; he had no ambition for any sort of literary or intellectual achievement. He hid, deep down in his being, a contempt that was actually malicious in its pride for all the human phenomena of worldly success. It was as if he had been some changeling from a different planet, a planet where the issues of life⁠—the great dualistic struggles between life and death⁠—never emerged from the charmed circle of the individual’s private consciousness.

Wolf himself, if pressed to describe it, would have used some simple earthly metaphor. He would have said that his magnetic impulses resembled the expanding of great vegetable leaves over a still pool⁠—leaves nourished by hushed noons, by liquid transparent nights, by all the movements of the elements⁠—but making some inexplicable difference, merely by their spontaneous expansion, to the great hidden struggle always going on in Nature between the good and the evil forces.