The music stopped and the lights went out

"On occasion I danced for nights on end, ever madder aboout people and life. At times, late on those nights when the dancing, the slight intoxication, my wild enthusiasm, everyone's violent unrestraint would fill me with a tired and overwhelmed rapture, it would seem to me - at the breaking point of fatigue and for a second's flash - that at last I understood the secret of creatures and of the world. But my fatigue would disappear the next day, and with it the secret; I would rush forth anew, I ran on like that, always heaped with favours, never satiated, without knowing where to stop, until the day - until the evening rather when the music stopped and the lights went out ..." 

Albert Camus, The Fall