" Yudenow was a controlled panic of self-preservation on two uncertain legs; abject slave to a mad desire for what beasts know as blind survival.
A comical beast, I thought, but asked myself, 'Why prolong mere living for its own sake?' The question answered itself: 'Because a beast is blind.' In Yudenow's case, he was animated by nothing but a terror of Nothing, a horror of ceasing to be; by a hopeless desire to evade consequence and issue, parry cause and duck effect. But he had - and you can read it in the faces of defeated fighters, doglike to the verge of tears in the outer offices - the hope-against-hope that, by fiddling and scraping against all the odds of the world, his ringcraft might outmaneuver the inevitable.
And do you know what? There is the Spirit of Man in this - good, bad, or indifferent, a certain heroism. "

― Gerald Kersh , Fowlers End