He arose laden with doubt as to how he should begin. He looked back at the bed where the grindstone lay. He looked out at the world, the most famous experimental prison of its time. Beyond the torture stakes he could see, nothing. Yet he could see.
“Now if you’re a human being, you probably realize that it’s possible for you to degenerate into a beast; people who don’t acknowledge this have actually degenerated in a different way, have lost a certain amount of self insight. And you can regress into being an ape, if that’s what you really want to do.”
Gene Wolfe