He returned from washing his hands...
>He returned from washing his hands, spent some minutes searching in desperation for his reading glasses before finding them on the seat beside him, and then realised he had not brought a pen. When at last he directed his attention out of the window a familiar misanthropy had settled on him and he saw in the built landscape sliding by nothing but ugliness and pointless activity.
In his corner of west London, and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for C. to think of civilisation as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine and the like. But now it appeared that this was what it really was - square miles of meagre modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but no one had been asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it. To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare or Milton, had ever existed? Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung further away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straigthened to a concrete sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere.
As far as the welfare of every [sic] other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.<
- Ian McEwan (1998) Amsterdam, pp. 63-64
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