Commonplace Book

'"If one could only stop the machinery for an hour or two," he said to himself, "and get a rest - expunge thought and feeling, put out one's eyes, shut one's ears, sit dumb, blind, solitary in the void - if there is a void. But that's just the intolerable wear and tear of it: there is no void, no space of silence and quiet. Everywhere energy, force, drive. Everywhere a crowd, a hideous jostling crowd of things struggling to be born, struggling to make themselves heard and felt, struggling to push something else aside so as to make their word, their want, their meaning known. And all to no purpose. Their word is emptiness, their want fruitless, their meaning nil. For the circle is never broken: nothing, nobody, can eve[n]r break out of it and be free. The great millstones turn and turn on themselves eternally, grinding down each generation - man, beast, all living things alike - into food for the coming generations, which in due time will be ground down too. If one could only remember that, be passive, be careless, refuse to expect, refuse to fight. But then comes in the infernal malice of the whole conception. Good care has been taken to make us so that we must expect, must fight. For the sake of keeping the gigantic farce in full play, we are tricked with an innate conviction of our own power, freedom, personality - tricked by the flattering conceit that it is not only possible but incumbent upon us to act, and create, and believe, and find out."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book IV, Chapter VII)