Octave Mirbeau
As I start 2014, I remember Mirbeau’s singular quote from the Torture Garden, a book I read over 2 decades ago:
“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That is the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”
My continuing resolution for the coming year is Never More.
S