Midnight All Day Hanif Kureishi

He walked out of the flat and kept walking through his pain until he reached the suburbs; at last he fell through fields and fields. He never returned to her place. The rest was a depressing cold abstinence and mourning, sitting at his desk half the day, every day, repeatedly summoning a half-remembered discipline, wishing someone would lash him to the chair. Those characters in Chekhov’s plays, forever intoning ‘work, work, work’. How stale a prayer, he thought, as though the world was better off for the slavery in it. But boredom was an antidote to unruly wishes, quelling his suspicion that disobedience was the only energy.
He had to teach himself to sit still again.