Escaping the predicament of the self
The difference between Einstein and Kafka, both sons of middle-class middle-European families, both of whom found life in the ordinary world intolerably dreary:
Einstein escaped the world by science, that is, by transcending not only the world but the Cosmos itself.
Kafka also escaped his predicament–occasionally–not by science but by art, that is, by seeing and naming what had heretofore been unspeakable, the predicament of the self in the modern world.
— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos
I didn’t love this book, which I found through Austin Kleon, but I did love the chapter on escaping the self and re-entry problems.