this scurvy and disasterous world of ours

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy has always blown me away with its postmodern tricks, devised long before there was even a modernism. Now - as everything shall be eventually - it's on-line.

I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles, -- but much more so, when he laughs, that it adds something to this Fragment of Life.

Via rockslinga