…in order to avoid external attack, they had also deliberately limited internal growth. They continued going to work, watching television, having children, complaining about traffic, but these things happened automatically, unaccompanied by any particular emotion, because, after all, everything was under control.
The great problem with poisoning by bitterness was that the passions—hatred, love, despair, enthusiasm, curiosity—also ceased to manifest themselves. After a while the embittered person felt no desire at all. He or she lacked the will either to live or to die, that was the problem.
That is why embittered people find heroes and madmen a perennial source of fascination, for they have no fear of life or death. Both heroes and madmen are indifferent to the danger and will forge ahead regardless of what other people say. The madmen committed suicide, the hero offered himself up to martyrdom in the name of a cause, but both would die, and the embittered would spend many nights and days remarking on the absurdity and glory of both. It was the only moment when the embittered person that the energy to clamber up his defensive walls and peer over at the world outside, but then his hands and feet would grow tired, and he would return to daily life.
The chronically embittered person only noticed his illness once a week, on Sunday afternoons. Then, with no work or routine to relive the symptoms, he would feel that something was very wrong, since he found the peace of those endless afternoons infernal and felt only a keen sense of constant irritation.
