The painting shows how mankind, seen as a part of the universe, i snothing more than a dull spineless mass, driven forward-
in happiness and unhappiness- in the service of eternal propogation; dreaming from the first flickering of his existence to
his powerless descent into the grave. In between there lies only a brief ecstatic period of union and a painful drifting apart.
Love has been a dissapointment, both in terms of pleasure and knowledge. Destiny never changes. Isolated from
cold clear knowledge, isolated from the eternally veiled questions of the universe, mankind struggles in his battle for happiness
and knowledge and remains a mere pawn in the hands of nature, which uses him for its eternal never changing purpose of propogation.
"the struggling to break through the imprisonng boundaries of sensual experience unites the human spirit in a tangible,
perciptible way with the infinite, the eternal, that which lies beyond all which is visible."
"Christomorphous self portrait in which the arist viewed himself as an outsider and victim of soceity... distance and
inapproachability .. preventing.. the destruction of the aura .. of singular appearance of distance, no matter how close.."
p 157 Gustav Klimnt "landscapes" Prestel
