There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of pretending; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat.

There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired of playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all our drug-taking and drama-drinking and in every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded senses… They try to stab their nerves to life, as if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves with nightmares.