Work and Play
To leave my place of work, where the kids have the radio tuned to the worst available pop station, with its aggressive, vocoder-strained, auto-tuned mediocrity (a fat butch, wearing a foot brace from a drunken accident, is explaining to a disinterested teenager how much better the song I Don’t Give a Fuck is in its un-edited form) to come home and listen to a concert performance of Bach’s cantatas, is to suspect that to live in the modern world, for all its comforts, opportunity, variety and safety, is nonetheless to live in a kind of hell.
untethered 
It's not the modern world; Western thought has always conceptualized earthly existence as a kind of hell. There is no other explanation for the combination of consciousness and mortality.But you can make a nice little corner of Hell with Bach playing in the background. So there's that.
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“At nightfall I return home and enter my study. There on the threshold I remove my dirty, mud-spattered clothes, slip on my regal and courtly robes, and thus fittingly attired, I enter the ancient courts of bygone men where, having received a friendly welcome, I feed on the food that is mine alone and that I was born for. I am not ashamed to speak with them and inquire into the reasons for their actions; and they answer me in kindly fashion. And so for four hours I feel no annoyance; I forget all troubles; poverty hold no fears, and death loses its terrors. I become entirely one of them.”
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