“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties [she did] and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves.”
Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Back when I was teaching Russian literature, I used to quote the above passage as directly applicable to the main heroine of Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina.
We all want to be, or at least a part of us wants to be like
Slim Pickens as Major King Kong at the end of Dr. Strangelove, riding a nuclear bomb like a rodeo steer,
galloping on that bull out of this world into Glory, hanging on with one hand,
waving a cowboy hat with the other, whooping out rebel yells: YAAAAAA-HOOOOO!
Riding the Bomb:
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