Dungeon of self

Living in the present (the only escape) has to be contrived by drugs, by injections of work or pleasure, or by the giving 'which plays you least false'. The past is a festering wound; the present the compress vainly applied, painfully torn off. [...] We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 52