They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the “existential vacuum.”

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Scottish nobleman who sells his soul to play the role of king in his own small story. At the end of his life he laments, I am sick at heart. . . . To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts

Connection to anything real, to the ancient, to the mystical, to the moment, is weak, so there is bound to be existential exhaustion.

Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves.