Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent,
and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough
to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right.
I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress,
that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would
inevitably make it over the top.
At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were
leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves
along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles
-- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the
other-that kept me going.
Hunter Stockton Thompson, "The Rum Diary", 1998
HST was talking about US journalists working in Puerto Rico
in the late 1950s, but I found it eerily reminiscent of how
I felt about Italian astronomers in Italy in the early 2010s!:/)
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