[...] I felt myself worn down, diminished beyond redemption; my mutterings and murmurs were those of an old man. I was now forty-seven, it was thirty years since I had started making my peers laugh; now I was finished, washed out, inert. The spark of curiosity that remained in my vision of the world was soon going to be extinguished, and then I would be as dead as the stones, only with some vague suffering on top of that. My career had not been a failure, at least not on the commercial level: if you attack the world with sufficient violence, it ends up spitting its filthy lucre back at you; but never, never will it give you back joy.