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There is some quite trivial, distant noise; a sound, moreover, which has nothin to do with me, to which there is not the slightest need for me to pay any attention; yet it suffices to wake me, and in no gentle way, either, but savagely, violently, shockingly, like an air raid alarm. The wheels, my masters, are already vibrating with incipient motion; the whole mechanism is preparing to begin the monotonous, hateful functioning of which I am the dispirited slave.
I began to feel that if I did not succeed in breaking out of the loathsome circle I should suddenly become mad, scream, perpetrate some shocking act of violence in the open street. But worst of all was the knowledge that the laws of my temperament would forbid me even a relief of this kind. I was inexorably imprisoned behind my own determination to display no emotion whatever.
Now I saw that I was in a street which I did not know very well. Night had fallen, the lights glowed mistily through a thin haze.
It was as though, in some mysterious way, I had become the central point around which the night scene revolved. People walking on the pavement looked at me as they passed. Some with pity, some with detached interest, some with more morbid curiosity. Some appeared to make small, concealed sights, but whether these were intended for warning or encouragement I could not be sure. The windows lighted or unlighted, were like eyes more or less piercing, but all focused upon me. The houses, the traffic, everything in sight, seemed to be watching to see what I would do.
To wait — with no living soul in whom to confide one's doubt, one's fears, one's relentless hope. Some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence.
Coiling itself round me it knows I cannot escape. Imprisoned in its very fabric, I am like a small worm, a parasite, which the host harbors not altogether unwillingly.
A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point. When this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure. No matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all.
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