When I look back on my life nowadays, which I seem to do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems most futible and absurd.
For instance, sucess in all it's guises; being know and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like aquiring money and seducing women, or traveling going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing what ever Vanity Fair has to offer.
In Retrospect, all the exercises in self-gradifaction seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, "licking the earth"