what next

[pynchonoid]

[...] At about the age of forty everything that can
happen to a man, death excepted, has happened;
happiness has gone to the devil or is a mere habit;
the blessing of poverty has been permanently secured
or you are exhausted with the cares of wealth; you can
see around the corner or you do not care to see around
it; in a word--that is, considering mental
existence--the bell has rung on you and you are up
against a steady grind for the remainder of your life.
It is then there
comes to the habitual novel reader the inevitable day
when, in anguish of heart, looking back over his life,
he--wishes he hadn't; then he asks himself the bitter
question if there are not things he has done that he
wishes he hadn't. Melancholy marks him for its own. He
sits in his room some winter evening, the lamp
swarming shadowy seductions, the grate glowing with
siren invitation, the cigar box within easy reach for
that moment when the pending sacrifice between his
teeth shall be burned out; his feet upon the familiar
corner of the mantel at that automatically calculated
altitude which permits the weight of the upper part of
the
body to fall exactly upon the second joint from the
lower end of the vertebral column as it rests in the
comfortable depression created by continuous wear in
the cushion of that particular chair to which every
honest man who has acquired the library vice sooner or
later gets attached with a love no misfortune can
destroy. As he sits thus, having closed the lids of,
say, some old favorite of his youth, he will
inevitably ask himself if it would not have been
better for him if he hadn't. And the question once
asked must be answered; and it will be an honest
answer, too. For no scoundrel was ever addicted to the
delicious vice of novel-reading. It is too tame for
him. "There is no money in it." [...] 

--The Delicious Vice by Young E. Allison
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8tdvc10.txt



		
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