Against the pride of the titans

He sat at his desk as he had sat at the table in his classroom back then when the world was not bigger than the small town he had lived in somewhere in the countryside.
There were several piles of papers without any significant mark of order spread around his laptop before him, which might have been of importance - or not.
He was sitting slackly in his chair, the hands resting on the keyboard of his notebook - ready to send out whatever thought worthwile sharing struck his mind.
But he did not feel like there was anything worthwile in his head. Instead he felt a faint echo of the restlessness that smote him from time to time ever since the big doubts had been muted by a dull aloofness whose nature he could neither name nor grasp.
He was reading an e-mail explaining in an angry, imperious style what he needed to improve at something he had written the day before. Most of the points were at a closer look not really valid, but he opened the file and started making smaller adjustements.

[...]

He closed the mail and started gathering additional materials he would need to attach to the document. His movements were impassionate, his thoughts slow, as if they were making their way to his consciousness through thick mucus.
"Something is not ok", he thought and there was no concern in this thought. "There has to be a pattern", he tried to continue, "a pattern of being human, which needs to be identified in order to understand what is going on in my head". He thought of the connections in his head, of the constellation of experiences and their interpretation, of the neurological explanations for consciousness. There was the key, he told himself. It needs to be mapped out, he thought, thoroughly and completely, to be understood, to be made accessible, to make it applicable. "No", he heard his voice, while focussed again on his task , "No, that is not important right now. That is not priority. It does not bring you nearer to the goals you are pursuing, the goals you set by dedicating yourself towards what you are doing right now." He dimly felt how the thought vanished with the awkward feeling of resentment against the inaccessible depth it had conveyed. He did not feel like chasing the ghosts of possible interconnections in the world. There was not the time for digging into the unknown.
He suddenly sat straight. What had he just thought?
If one would have looked into his eyes, he would have seen his usual glance of incomprehensible perceptiveness just with a slight feature of looking inwards - but the sensation which he actually had was blank terror.
He had condemned curiosity and stopped digging deeper where he would have needed to use the sharpness of his mind and not just his intuition. He had denied the possibility of a new knowledge for the sake of focussing on what he was told was absolutely necessary for success.
Success of what?
He rose from his chair and started packing his belongings as if he was trying to escape not from his desk but from something it represented. "Something is wrong", he repeated over and over again in his mind, "Something is terribly wrong!".

[...]