He walked like a soldier having returned from a war, at least how he might have seen it, as he walked downtown to the office on the fifth floor, the person to talk to, safely, a woman a good fifteen years younger.  Then, because he was still off, still outside of everything, disconnected, in his own process, because he hadn't figured out anything, even still, as a returning vet, he would go to the job, working the bar.  He was no longer excited about the job.  It had always been a matter of being okay once he got there, but he knew it too had its costs, its unfairness, placing him back in the trenches of shitty conditions, shift work, bad for the body.  But now, less and less.

It's a common theme.  Platonov, The Potudon River, a great example, saying very little.  Tolstoy, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Melville, Crane, they all played with the general idea...

Aeschylus, there is no bravery without realizing the suffering and the sadness as qualities of existence.