What is contentment?
Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working. I asked him what he answered, and he told me: contentment was absorbedness ... With enthusiasm I agreed with him, speaking of early morning hours, concentration on the page and its words, total loss of identity, hours that pass like seconds or without any notion of time elapsing: It is always the paradox of contentment -of happiness or joy that to remain at its pitch it must include no consciousness of itself you are only content when you have no notion of contentment.
Only making love, I said, is anything like it.
— Donald Hall, Life Work