This came from the mind of a elderly man with Parkinson’s disease who was contemplating suicide—all via the mind of Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections.

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.