Promenade

I want to be an old man
with nothing to do
but buckle my shoe,
looking out at the people
walking on the promenade,
happy to be rid of wanting.

This

He approached the bed. The still invisible occupant snored profoundly. There was a quality of profound and complete surrender in it. Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as if he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to defeat or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death.

William Faulkner

...and this

For to keep from encountering that fiend who dwells in the sweet Kundalini of our spine, so do we take on our booze, our pot, our coke, our nicotine, our tranks and sleeping pills, our habits and our churches, our prejudices and our bigotries, our ideology, our stupidity itself—the most vital of insulations!—and I encountered nearly all of them in the week before I tried to climb the Monument and conquer the unmanageable in myself. 

Norman Mailer