The passage of time whittles away ambition, to the point where the non-talented become lip-curling, miserable solipsists.
If once the intention was to illuminate the whole universe with the light of the intellect, this aspiration soon dwindles, and getting out of bed is itself a lofty aim.
Oh, the exhaustion of trying to decode the world soon becomes too much - the ineluctable principles of imaginary numbers and dimensionless vectors just doesn't sink in, and defeat after defeat chills the bones.
So we compromise our ambitions - if we can't understand the world, then understanding even part of it will suffice. Even this, though, is too difficult, and we give up and walk away in frustration: learning another language where the strange words trip over each other and die.
What remains when ambition has dwindled to a cinder, a slender loop of light surrounding not the universe or even the world, but just the stinking vessel of the self? The remorseless ticking off of seconds and minutes and hours and days and.... spent in a self-contained bubble of anaesthetic.
Withering before my very eyes, there is little left. Writing like an incompetent, and the Spanish preterite's bones dissolving into forgetfulness. There is little left - determination, purpose, confidence.
Everything, when left untended, either grows unchecked or returns to a foetal nub.
