The Nemo

Further to the bits about the nemo in my post earlier today I've just read this appropriate section from an article in today's Independent newspaper (written by Richard Schoch):

Many people are trapped in a spiral of consumption that compels them to buy ever more luxurious items to maintain a consistent amount of pleasure. At some point, and it arrives sooner and sooner, pleasure turns first to boredom, then to dissatisfaction, and, finally, to anxiety. We torture ourselves by asking why our hard-earned possessions fail to make us happy. Our clothes are never stylish enough, our cars never fast enough, our homes never palatial enough.
One secret of happiness is to moderate our pleasures, so that we find ourselves in the hugely more satisfying state of tranquillity, where simple things yield as much enjoyment as luxuries. Once we grow accustomed to simple things we have a better time in life, because we appreciate luxuries all the more, if they come along.

And I make an oblique (possibly, opaque) alignment of the above words with this quotation below which I think I may already have made famous by quoting it in "Nemonymous" and elsewhere over the years!

The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.
-- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')