#110 Your Finger Is the Cannonball Your Ancestors Never Saw Coming

Anyone who has tried to spend an evening alone, in a room, with a window darkening, will recognize the unease that arrives before the quiet does. It has no object. It is not fear of something. It is the simple, almost physical realization that one's own company is no longer sufficient, and that some part of the mind has been trained to expect a constant current of small excitements.

This is the strange thing about our present condition: it asks nothing of us by force. It does not pound or demand. It has already been welcomed inside, and it has arranged the furniture so quietly that we call the arrangement our own personality.

The tragedy is not that we are made restless. It is that we have come to prefer restlessness to the brief silence that would show us what we are without it.