You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.

I become drunk as circumstances dictate.

While we are alive we should sit among colored lights and taste good wines, and discuss our adventures in far places; when we are dead, the opportunity is past.

The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.

The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.

Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.

Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.