The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

acquired incapacity for the gentler pleasures.
One of the worst features of nervous fatigue is that
it acts as a sort of screen between a man and the
outside world. Impressions reach him, as it were,
muffled and muted; he no longer notices people
except to be irritated by small tricks or
mannerisms; he derives no pleasure from his meals
or from the sunshine, but tends to become tensely
concentrated upon a few objects and indifferent to
all the rest. This state of affairs makes it
impossible to rest, so that fatigue continually
increases until it reaches a point where medical
treatment is required. All this is at bottom a
penalty for having lost that contact with Earth of
which we spoke in the preceding chapter. But how
such contact is to be preserved in our great modern
urban agglomerations of population, it is by no
means easy to see. However, here again we find
ourselves upon the fringe of large social questions
with which in this volume it is not my intention to
deal.