So young people found a use for their latent energy by affecting despair. To rail against glory, religion, love, and everything in the world is a great consolation for those who do not know what do; they mock themselves, and prove themselves right by doing so. And then it is pleasant to believe onself wretched when one is simply empty and bored.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
2 August 2012
Empty and Bored
Alfred de Musset, La confession d'un enfant du siècle (Paris: Larousse, 1900), p. 15. My translation: