“Year by year, his life wasn’t amounting to anything at all... And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity – oh, the tediousness of it... Shouldn’t he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.”
