We desire intensely. In a crunch, family, friends, career, honor, even life itself may be swept away.
My plight, my curse, my demon, a savage yearning for something I'm never going to get. Something to redeem me. From what? From vanity, from insignificance, transience. From dung and death.
Most of the time I can arrange not to know, but it's always there, lurking, my own beast in the jungle; and sometimes it springs, lays waste my spirit, leaving only shards and rubble of meaning.
— Allen Wheelis, The Way We Are