If everything can seem indifferent when you have encountered the most beatiful of things, why don’t we regard the opposite situation as equally fateful: having read the worst book, having seen the dullest landscape, having met the stupidest, ugliest woman? There should be a perfection of – and hence an absolute limit to – the insignificant, the useless, the trivial and banal, beyond which, as in the contrary case, there would be nothing more worth waiting for.

In fact, it is not that way. After seeing the worst, you do not say “O time, suspend they flight!” There is no ecstasy of uselessness.