We were born among the ruins

“I’d rather feel burned by a diabolic pain than to live in these sanely temperate surroundings. A wild desire flares up in me for intense emotions, sensations, a rage against this whole toneless, flat, normal, sterilized life, and a wish to destroy something—perhaps a warehouse, a cathedral, or myself—and to commit outrageous follies. . . . This in fact is what I have always most hated, abhorred, and cursed: this satisfaction, this complacent healthiness, this plump bourgeois optimism, this life of the mediocre, normal, common man.”*

Paul van den Bosch, in his Les enfants de l’absurde, wrote: “We are the ghosts of a war that we have not fought. . . . Having opened our eyes on a disenchanted world, we are more than any others the children of the absurd. On certain days, the senselessness of the world weighs on us like a deformity. It seems to us that God has died of old age, and we exist without a goal. . . . We are not embittered; we start from zero. We were born among the ruins. When we were born, the gold was already transmuted into lead.”

*Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf