The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell

But, much as man's religion looked to a more ordered and symmetrical existence tomorrow, just so, upon another scale, man's daily life seemed a continuous looking-forward to a terrestrial tomorrow. Kennaston could find in the past -- even he, who was privileged to view the past in its actuality, rather than through the distorting media of books and national pride -- no suggestion as to what, if anything, he was expected to do while his physical life lasted, or to what, if anything, this life was a prelude. Yet that today was only a dull overture to tomorrow seemed in mankind an instinctive belief. All life everywhere, as all people spent it, was in preparation for something that was to happen tomorrow. This was as true of Antioch as Lichfield, as much the case with Charlemagne and Sardanapalus, with Agamemnon and Tiglath-Pileser, as with Felix Kennaston.

Kennaston considered his own life. In childhood you had looked forward to being a man -- a trapper of the plains or a railway engineer or a pirate, for choice, but pending that, to get through the necessity of going to school five times a week. In vacations, of course, you looked forward to school's beginning again, because next term was to be quite different from the last, and moreover because last session, in retrospection, did not appear to have been half bad. And of course you were always wishing it would hurry up and be your birthday, or Christmas, or even Easter. Later, with puberty, had come the desire to be a devil with the women, like the fellows in Wycherley's plays (a cherished volume, which your schoolmates, unaccountably, did not find sufficiently "spicy"); and to become a great author, like Shakespeare; and to have plenty of money, like the Count of Monte-Cristo; and to be thrown with, and into the intimate confidence of, famous people, like the hero of a Scott novel. Kennaston reflected that his touchstones seemed universally to have come from the library. And Felix Kennaston had achieved his desire, to every intent, however unready posterity stood to bracket him with Casanova or Don Juan, and however many tourists still went with reverence to Stratford. For the rest, he had sufficient money and quite certainly he had met more celebrities than any other person living. Felix Kennaston reflected that, through accident's signal favor, he had done all he had at any time very earnestly wanted to do; and that the result was always disappointing, and not as it was depicted in storybooks. He wondered why he should again be harking back to literary standards.