On a journey. On a ship. With a book in hand.
"But without a good dose of dementia, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. The reason: rust of our vitality. It is the madman within us who compels us to adventure; if he abandons us, we are lost; and it is still he who makes our blood circulate in our veins. Has he left? Here we are alone! One cannot be together normal and alive. If I remain in an upright position and prepare to fill the moment that arrives, if in short, I conceive the future, a happy disturbance of my mind is its cause. I exist and act because I am irrational, because I put my ravings into action. If I become sensible, everything intimidates me: I slip toward absence, toward springs that do not want to flow, toward that prostration which life must have known before conceiving movement, I access through cowardice the intimate nature of things, entirely forced into an abyss of which I do not know what to do since it isolates me from becoming. An individual, like a people, like a continent, becomes extinct when he is repulsed by reckless plans and actions, when instead of daring toward being, he takes refuge in it, fortifying himself: metaphysics of regression, of this side, retreat toward the primordial" (E. M. Cioran, La tentazione di esistere, Adelphi, 1984, p. 41)