Nadja - pg. 17

He has familiarized me with that tremulous ennui which almost any spectacle induced in him; no one before Huysmans could, if not exemplify this great victory of the involuntary over the ravaged domain of conscious possibilities, at least convince me in human terms of its absolute inevitability and of the uselessness of trying to find loopholes for myself. How grateful I am to him for letting me know, without caring about the effect such revelations produced, everything that affects him, that occupies him in his hours of gravest anxiety, everything external to his anxiety, for not pathetically "singing" his distress like too many poets, but for enumerating patiently, in the darkness, some quiet involuntary reasons he still found for being, and for being -- to whose advantage he never really knew -- a writer!