Kafka: Plight of the Bachelor (extract).

The prospect of remaining a bachelor is so awful: to be an old man and struggle to preserve one's dignity while asking to be taken in for an evenings worth of human society; to be sick and to gaze for weeks on end into one's empty room from the vantage point of one's bed; always to say goodbye at the front door;  never to make one's way upstairs at the side of one's wife; to have the side doors to one's room always opening on to others apartments; to carry one's supper home in one hand; to have to stare at children, without always adding, unasked:  'I haven't any myself ';  to model one's apparel and demeanor on one or two bachelors one might remember from one's own early years.  - Kafka.