It is absurd and a detestable shame, that we should suffer those traditions to be changed which we have received from the fathers of old.

I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks: the ghost of a linnen decency yet haunts us.

Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present.

Barbarism can match civilization’s every stench. Not one move in our frostbit lives but is strictured by a mad god’s laws, which we call customs, and by black-handed irrationalities from which there is no escape.

...burdened with the unbearable weight of ourselves.

In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make.

Our civilization appears to’ve fallen so deeply into the habit of invasion that we cannot even obey a simple order of the Imperium without the old ways cropping up.

Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present. [3]

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

We all of us live upon the past, and through the past we are destroyed.

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control,
constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave.
The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed
down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our
institutions.

We require rules, standards, values — alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence.

I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.