Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.
In fact, almost every job you get somebody watching you.
Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality.
Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.