Stoner

by John Williams

as the years went on, the dissatisfaction and bitterness increased, so general and pervasive that no specific remedy might assuage them.

He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.