Oliver Brauning

“I've encountered no greater mystery in life than myself. In a just society I'd be warehoused somewhere. But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry. He finds himself co-opted. Difficult these days to be a rake or a bounder. A roué. A deviant? A pervert? Surely you're joking. The new dispensations have all but erased these categories from the language. You can no longer be a loose woman . For instance. A trollop. The whole concept is meaningless. You cant even be a drug addict. At best you're just a user. A user? What the fuck is that? We've gone from dope friends to drug users in just a few short years. It doesn't take Nostradamus to see where this is headed. The most heinous of criminals clamoring for standing. Serialkillers and cannibals claiming a right to their lifestyle. Like anyone else I try to sort out where I fit into this menagerie. Without malefactors the world of the righteous is robbed of all meaning. As for myself again if I cant be decorum's sworn enemy while savoring its fruits I simply see no place for me at all. What would you recommend, Squire? Go home and draw a warm bath and climb in and open a vein? Never mind. I see you weighing the merits of it. Anyway, Hoffer has it right. Real trouble doesn't begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they'd never imagined.
Boredom.
Squire, I'm a scoundrel very nearly without peer. But in our time decent people actually attract comment. We dont know what to make of them. They have few friends, while I have more friends than I know what to do with. Why is that?
I dont know.
I think it's because people are bored out of their fucking minds. I cant come up with anything else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“You deny our brotherhood. Insisting as to do in your sly way that that our genealogies and our socioeconomic standings have set us apart at birth in a manner not to be contravened. But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“And of youre herte up casteth the visage
To thilke God that after his ymage
Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a faire
This world, that passeth soone as floures faire”
― Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde