Train Lit

The optimistic desparation: mostly life's shit, but I'm not alone in that despair and the camraderie gives me hope:

"I have not managed to accept existence and to accept myself. I can see nothing beyond the beings and the things that surround me and that seem to me enigmas, more or less. I can never, or seldom, or with great difficulty, get on with other people, because I cannot get on with myself either. The forms of satisfaction I have sought, and found, to fill my life, its emptiness, its nostalgia, have sometimes succeeded, but how inadequately, in disguising the malaise of existence. They once distracted me, but can no longer do so. Pain, grief, failure have always seemed to me truer than success or pleasure. I have always tried to live, but I have passed life by. I think that is what most men feel."

-Eugene Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal, 1967, trans. by Jean Stewart