impulses starved of expression
He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away, and felt on some level that this had something to do with him and his circumstances and what, if this grueling final debauch he’d committed himself to didn’t somehow resolve the problem, would surely have to be called his problem
Context
The book's abstract diagram of the appetite it keeps anatomizing: desire watched but not acted on, drying and floating away — and the dim sense that this desiccation is the problem, one the debauch is supposed to resolve and obviously will not. He can name the shape of the thing but cannot connect it to himself, which is the diagnostic distance the whole scene lives inside.