The Unsettling

Once, long ago, very long ago, it was with a sense of joy that I sat down at my desk to write. Next, it was merely with a certain pleasure. Later, it was with indifference, out of habit and even with a sort of boredom. Later still, when I was writing dozens of pages of a journal devoted to the arguments I had with my former friends who were becoming Fascists or Nazis or Iron Guards, I would sit down at my desk despite a certain reluctance. Today, the thought that I've got to write fills me with sheer horror. Today, when I begin to write, there stirs within me an even keener and more intolerable awareness of the tragedy, the danger, the universal anguish, and I long to escape, to divert my mind, to forget it all.
--Eugene Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal