Reading the newspaper is always unpleasant from an aesthetic point of view, and often from a moral point of view as well, even for those who don’t worry much about morality.

Reading about the effects of wars and revolutions – there’s always one or the other in the news* – doesn’t make us feel horror but tedium. What really disturbs our soul isn’t the cruel fate of all the dead and wounded, the sacrifice of all who die in action or who die without seeing action, but the stupidity that sacrifices lives and property to some inevitably futile cause. All ideals and all ambitions are a hysteria of prattling women posing as men. No empire justifies breaking a child’s doll. No ideal is worth the sacrifice of a toy train. What empire is useful or what ideal profitable? It’s all humanity, and humanity is always the same – variable but unimprovable, with fluctuations but unprogressive. Vis-à-vis the intransigent march of all things, the life that we were given without knowing why and that we’ll lose we don’t know when, the ten thousand chess games that constitute our life in common and in conflict, the tedium of uselessly contemplating what we’ll never accomplish ..... – vis-à-vis all that, what can the wise man do but ask to retire, to be excused from having to think about life (since living it is already burdensome enough), to have a little sun and fresh air and at least the dream that there’s peace on the other side of the hills?