26. The Vile Becoming! - Evelyn Waugh

From Decline and Fall

Why can’t the creatures stay in one place? Up and down, in and out,
round and round! Why can’t they sit still and work? Do dynamos require staircases? Do monkeys require houses?
What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How
obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of this biological by-product!
This half formed, ill conditioned body! This erratic maladjusted mechanism of his soul; on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!!