That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees -
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
- W.B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

Trapped in a job that is the epitome of alienation, a pawn in some self-important office kingpin's game with no power and no creativity, I long for this kind of transcendance. My time not my own, my talents wasted, my hours an infinite bone-numbing drone of repetition and taking pains, I cry out for stimulation, for beauty, for simple feeling. I feel the seconds of my life tick away as I sit in this chair editing the latest dry-as-dust, self-congratulatory hogwash by some politician and wonder what I went to school for or which stage of rot my brain has attained. I have had just the right combination of learning and opportunity to become the perfect brain in a vat: a thinking machine to be harnessed for capital and profit but suspended, immobilised, impotent. I want to sing but all the words are repeats. I want another's arms but sensual happiness is beyond me: there isn't the time, there isn't the energy. I've been swallowed whole, consumed, my person reduced to a name in black type on a makeshift orange felt wall.

I want to be consumed by holy fire, to become hammered gold, to find eternity. But as it is I am dross on hire for a pittance, a faceless voice on the telephone asking inane question after inane question, a computerised sign-in name charting productivity statistics and error counts. In some sense I feel like a thruppence prostitute hawking my brain and my eyesight for whoever will take me, my mind disconnected from my will and lashed to the mast of the highest bidder. Fifteen years of school, fifteen years of learning to appreciate the curiosity of the intellect and the burning need to further knowledge, understanding, even empathy: it matters little in the real world, where it's earn or starve. This isn't Byzantium. My knowledge counts for nothing and my skills, even less. My love is trapped in a logjam of work schedules and off days.

It doesn't matter how human, or how humane, you are. Not in this wilderness. Just shut up, do your job and earn your monthly wage. Buy things that make you happy and earn some more. Keep your head down and blame someone else. Pencil your love life, your family and yourself into your daily planner. And if you die unfulfilled, if you started out with apple pie in the sky hopes and crashed to earth in the clutches of conventional domesticity, just be happy that your bank balance looks nice and your children are in good schools and your wife is still slim and your maid hasn't been abused. This is it. Face it. This isn't Byzantium. This is life.