The world is inherited by the obnoxious, not the righteous.
We each fashion our “others” and chart the course of our lives as that eternal campaign, seasons of gain, seasons of loss. Battles and wounds and triumphs and bitter defeats. In comforts we fashion our strongholds. In convictions we occupy our fortifications. In violence we forge our peace. In peace, we win desolation.
How perfect is running? This grand delusion of flight? Away from our demons, ever away, until even the self sobs loose, spins lost in our wake. Perfect, oh yes. And a thing to despise. No distance can win an escape; no speed can outrun this self and all its host of troubles. It’s only the sweet exhaustion that follows that we so cherish. An exhaustion so pure it is as close to dying as we can get without actually doing so.
Words need not be spoken aloud, friend, to prove unwelcome. I but answered my own thoughts.
You mortals baffle me.
To measure time, one must begin. To grow futureward, one must root. Deep into the ground with blood.
Every story instructs. The teller ignores this truth at peril.
People spoke of ill luck. Mischance. They spoke of unruly spirits and vengeful gods. And some spoke of the most terrible truth of all – that the world and all life in it was nothing but a blind concatenation of random occurrences. Cause and effect did nothing but map out the absurdity of things, before which even the gods were helpless.
Death and dying makes us into children once again, in truth, one last time, there in our final wailing cries. More than one philosopher has claimed that we ever remain children, far beneath the indurated layers that make up the armour of adulthood. Armour encumbers, restricts the body and soul within it. But it also protects. Blows are blunted. Feelings lose their edge, leaving us to suffer naught but a plague of bruises, and, after a time, bruises fade.
Too easy to conclude, with a private sneer, that men were simple. Granted, had they been strangers, they might well be circling and sniffing each other’s anuses right now.
Strange how the past was remade to suit the present.
The three other rickety chairs had been pulled up around the lone table in the room’s centre. Above the table hung an oil lantern, which shone down on Fiddler, Hedge and Mallet as they sat playing cards.
The curse of the witless is to beat one’s head against the obstinate wall of how things really are, rather than what they insist upon their being.
But the value was an illusion. Hate was a lie that in feeding fills the hater with the feeling of satiation, even as his spirit starves.
My inability to find peace, to trust it when I do find it, and to hold on to it.
Kill, thought Ditch, nodding, kill, yes, I understand. I do. Kill, for her. Kill. And he found that the word itself, yes, the word itself, knew how to smile.
They died, Highness, even as they delivered those thirty thousand refugees to safety. They died, but they won.
Every artist was haunted by lies. Every artist fought to find truths. Every artist failed. Some turned back, embracing those comforting lies. Others took their own lives in despair. Still others drank themselves into the barrow, or poisoned everyone who drew near enough to touch, to wound. Some simply gave up, and wasted away in obscurity. A few discovered their own mediocrity, and this was the cruellest discovery of all. None found their way to the truths.
We lie about our past to make peace with the present. If we accepted the truth of our history, we would find no peace – our consciences would not permit it. Nor would our rage.
We are, all of us, nothing but impostors to our cause, because the cause we espouse is nothing more than the blind we raise to hide our own ambitions.