"Before writing “Boxer” I could do nothing but sing of his fragility and solitude; of the weight of his dramatic life and the tragic sense of death, of banality, that belongs even to ancient masterpieces we would wish to be eternal. The uncertainty that has often surrounded their attribution, the mutilated and fragmentary condition in which they have almost always come down to us from antiquity, gave me the cue to speak of the transience of life, of every one of man’s works, of the meaning of time."