From 188 Contes à régler
At the time, there was no shortage of disturbing problems, and everyday life provided them in abundance. But the problem of unemployment had been resolved for a disarmingly simple reason: everywhere, employees only worked part-time.
Indeed, man had immersed himself so deeply in language that he had ended up sinking into it.
The Atomic Age was succeeded by the Age of Words. The need to believe in the profound meaning of life, the refusal of all cold lucidity, the thirst to tell one's story, to justify each psychological surge, the neurosis of analyzing one's personal case, of confessing by telephone, on the radio, on television, to one's psychoanalyst or in public; all this hysteria that had begun several decades earlier became a new way of living at the dawn of the 21st century.
Indeed, no one worked full-time anymore; the laws had decreed it so. Half of the day was to be devoted to work, and the other half to dissecting what one was experiencing, why one had acted in such a way, what should have been done, and what one would do or would forbid oneself from doing.
In the beginning was the word. In the end, too.