Number One Hundred and One

"There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness--like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness; and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake (though probably the awareness itself, of nothingness, was the only mistake; some failure of optimism or illusion, to be corrected, somehow)--he could no longer get at." pp. 170-71.