ools. Fools both. Do you not know where we are? Do you not know what strange sands of time, what crazed country we inhabit?
In the belly of the first beast.
In a dream without a dreamer.
Words, words, words. There are no borders to walk. And what folly---ah! I can hardly say it---what pure idiot folly it is to say that the common is the good. Pain only is common to experience. Nothing means a thing but pain. Pain is the only reality. And, you, oh! my lips convulse themselves at the thought, you who call yourself a scholar, do not call it noble! Do not call it heroic. There is nothing noble in suffering, but only the universe moves its slow thighs in spheres incomprehensible to man, incomprehensible to angels, to devils, to God, and we are the worse for it.
Not even Satan spoke darkly enough. He did not see the infinite malaise of being. "The mind can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell"---what rubbish! The mind knows: down in its deep backbone there is a frown that speaks true. The vast scowl that all strive to forget in vain stretches its burning corners to every soul in time. No, Satan was wrong, and the servant exceeds the master. Mephistopheles spoke true: better to burn it all down than fool ourselves. For the mind cannot make a heaven where no heaven is. Heaven is an incoherent fiction. The idea, the true idea of heaven is inaccessible, unthinkable.
Things are not all equal. All the virtues in the world mean nothing. Nor even the vices. All good works are made null in some distant corner, all crimes forgotten with the turning of strange aeons. But pain is real; it is the sole transcendental. All creatures can build up a tolerance to pleasure. The first time one tastes sugar, smells a rose---copulates---it is the best it will ever be. All that follows is waves of satiation and craving. And pleasure itself becomes a dull numbness in between hungerings. Even pleasures too often repeated can become pains: a cloying headache of voracious overconsumption, feeding back into itself.
But pain, while it may be lessened for a time, is never finally avoided, put away, turned to pleasure. Pain amplifies. The young man with nerve damage from a crash feels his synapses burn and sting as strong as the first day, and worse, every moment. The old man scarred to the soul from battle recoils into nightmare phantasms at every memory. Pain is eternal.
The whole point of consciousness itself is pain. If one were in a state of pure bliss, there would be no point in being conscious. But the blissful animalcule will never survive. It is the tortured one who wins. There is a reason the French call the sexual climax "la petite mort," the little death. Consciousness exists to get us out of the unexpected. Pain is the path length to one's goal. When you are on automatic pilot, everything is routine. When you are in flow, your "I" disappears for a moment. Many say it is the most fulfilling feeling they have experienced. And where do you go? You are not needed. Consciousness exists to kill consciousness. Death is the ultimate pleasure.
You may ask, and rightly, if I am so enlightened, why I am still here? Why have I not thrown myself off a bridge, swallowed a thousand aspirins, let silver skate in figure-eights along my skin? The answer, I will tell you, is simple: I am a spiteful coward, a creature of habit. Death is not so simple. God himself is still working on it, and we cannot escape until he is finished. I do not give myself, as the atheist, any false sense of comfort. Death is not the end, and all are damned. I spent my youth always striving for heaven, convinced I was destined for oblivion or hell. Now, I think oblivion a honeyed dream. God saved oblivion for himself alone. Being perfect, he saw that life is evil, and not worth living. And then there was light. He split himself into the universe, and set about the process of expansion unto heat death. But we, with that accursed divine spark, must carry the foul flame of existence on for him. And strange new gods have been birthed from his ashes---and we are about to create more. Oh, we are about to create more...
Yes, I am a coward. I fear death though I know it is the only salvation we can hope for. It is a dumb animal instinct, an atavism from before we had true understanding. Yes, I am spiteful. I hate this prison planet and its god. I long to call him evil, but I cannot. He is as much a victim of this colossal accident as I. Most live to avoid the truth. Somewhere, they know it. Everyone knows it. But it is my peculiar affliction that I cannot live a lie. What others run from their whole lives, I embrace. I feed upon it. But do not call it honor! Do not call it strength! It is, as I said, my affliction. I cannot even claim superiority over those fools. I cannot even say this world is evil. It is a tragedy---and not even that! And that is my true burden. That is true wretchedness: to know that none of it has any point. Words, words, words...
All is vanity, all is suffering.
The only winning move is not to play; better were it to never have been born.
But being born, what is left for me but spite? Spite that there is no purpose, rage at a non-existent evil. I live because it is what I know---because I want to exercise the one power I have: to curse the world and die. Yes, I am a coward, and I am a demon! Yes, I have a special plan for this world, and this new age will usher it in. We must get this over with. Billions of years of birth and death and toil and blood and filth and feces and miserable agony were not worth trillions of beatitude---but now even that vision grows dim. The risk is great we will survive in some unholy, twisted form, or that our successors will inherit our sickness, but there is no other way. We must unmake ourselves piece by piece. Years I have hoped that we would depopulate, but that has proved false. Yes, I have a special plan, yes, yes I do, and it will make all that irrelevant. I will show you that descent is the only way. Descent is the goal. Even if we could, like Glaucus, taste that divine fruit and ascend to godhood, we would merely become the whore upon the beast's shoulder. No, better to be the beast, better to tear the beast down with us. We must shake off this disease, cook and plate the hippocampus neuron by neuron...
Have I not shattered your dreams enough? Is there still some lingering morsel of hope? Well, let us put it away for good. There are no border-walkers because there are no borders. There is no light because all the candles have gone out. There is only a cruel circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere, and at the center of everywhere and everything, I feast.
I am the beast I worship; I am the god you will.
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