my mind races with all my longings but can't keep up with what i got

It's not true that i'm always thinking of _. work and conversation make that impossible. but the times when i'm not are perhaps my worst. for then, thought i have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs-- nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast time-- but the atmosphere, the taste of the whole thing is deadly. so with this. i see the rowan berries reddening and don't know for a moment why they of all things should be depressing. i hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound. what's wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn out looking. then i remember. this is one of the things i'm afraid of. the agonies, the mad midnight moments, must in the course of nature, fade away. but what will follow? just this apathy, this dead flatness? will there come a time when i no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because i shall take the squalor as normal? does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?


C.S.Lewis