Isaac Whatever

"I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes
punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them
talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about
illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of
the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are
to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built
your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through
which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in
your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of
provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the
tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great
problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You
are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself
questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the
shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were
shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the
sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited
you in the beginning."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars