Knowing how tormenting I can find even the smallest things, I deliberately avoid them. Imagine how someone like me, who suffers when even a cloud obscures the sun, must suffer in the dark day that has always been his life!

My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have soul enough to achieve, nor for tranquillity, which no one achieves unless they never lost it in the first place; it is a search for sleep, extinction, and a modest renunciation.

The four walls of my poor room are, simultaneously, cell and distance, bed and coffin. My happiest hours are those during which I think nothing and want nothing, when I do not even dream, lost in the vegetable torpor of the moss that grows on the surface of life. I enjoy without bitterness my absurd consciousness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.

I never had anyone whom I could call “Master.” No Christ died for me. No Buddha indicated the path I should take. No Apollo or Athena appeared to me in my dreams to illumine my soul.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

As a single balloon must stand for a lifetime of balloons, so each citizen expressed, in the attitude he chose, a complex of attitudes. One man might consider that the balloon had to do with the notion sullied, as in the sentence The big balloon sullied the otherwise clear and radiant Manhattan sky. That is, the balloon was, in this man’s view, an imposture, something inferior to the sky that had formerly been there, something interposed between the people and their “sky.” But in fact it was January, the sky was dark and ugly; it was not a sky you could look up into, lying on your back in the street, with pleasure, unless pleasure, for you, proceeded from having been threatened, from having been misused. And the underside of the balloon was a pleasure to look up into, we had seen to that, muted grays and browns for the most part, contrasted with walnut and soft, forgotten yellows. And so, while this man was thinking sullied, still there was an admixture of pleasurable cognition in his thinking, struggling with the original perception.

Donald Barthelme, “The Balloon”