Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan’s footsteps too, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession.

Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future.

For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn?

From Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947)