The resistance of matter.

He didn’t have two cents’ worth of patience, his thoughts moved too fast and too far, they were too intense, too deep . . . The resistance of matter gave him an epileptic fit . . . The result was wreckage . . . He could tackle a problem in theory . . . But when it came to practice, all he could do on his own was swing dumbbells in the back room . . . or on Sunday climb into the basket and shout “Let her go” . . . and roll up in a ball to land when he was through . . . Whenever he tried to do any tinkering with his own fingers, it ended in disaster. He couldn’t move anything without dropping it or upsetting it . . . or getting it in his eye . . . You can’t be an expert at everything . . . You’ve got to resign yourself . . .

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan (1933) (trans. Ralph Manheim 1966)