In hourglasses the grains of sand increasingly rub one another smooth until finally they flow almost without friction from one bulb into the other, polishing the neck wider all the time. The older an hourglass the more quickly it runs. Unnoticed, the hourglass measures out ever shorter hours.

-- Ernst Juenger


There are ... two kinds of spleen; one mocking, active, passionate, malignant; the other morose and wholly passive, when one's only wish is for silence and solitude and the oblivion of sleep. For anyone possessed by this latter kind, nothing has meaning, the destruction of the world would hardly move him. At such times I could wish the earth were a shell filled with gunpowder, which I would put a match to for my diversion.

-- Hector Berlioz, Memoirs, translated by David Cairns.