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"once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. from the beginning, it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which i breathed in through the gills. in the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. in everything, i quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. i was my own worst enemy. there was nothing i wished to do which i could not just as well not do. even as a child, when i lacked for nothing, i wanted to die: i wanted to surrender because i saw no sense in struggling. i felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which i had not asked for. everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. especially the successful ones. the successful ones bored me to tears. i was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. it was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. i never helped anyone expecting that it would do any good; i helped because i was helpless to do otherwise. to want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, i was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? now and then a friend was converted: it was something to make me puke. i had no more need of god than he had of me, and if there were one, i often said to myself, i would meet him calmly and spit in his face."

-- henry miller, tropic of capricorn.