Thought for the Week

The almost irresistible urge to violence which comes to me at times--the lust to break, smash and destroy things, to hurl chains through windows, fling a brick at the TV's eye, crumple automobiles into lamp-posts, rip doors off their hinges, push walls aside, overturn office desks and toss typewriters and dictaphones out fifth-story windows, to heap all papers, forms, letters, documents, photostats, manuals, booklets, phone books into a pile, drench with gasoline and ignite, to smash traffic lights, cut cables and wires (the nervous system of syphilization), uproot mailboxes and fireplugs and phone booths, bust through the glass barrier, level all billboards....

Oh God, there is a fearful tornado of Nothingness spinning in my soul. Raging against my own inner deadness--I have cut myself off from so much, I can barely reach my own children, my own wife, I truly love no one. I live in a vast solitude....

Edward Abbey, Journal XI, November 9, 1962