Johnny put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He might have heard it fire before he lost consciousness. Something soft was moving in his mouth. His tongue slid over it. The feeling was familiar. Johnny opened his eyes. Through the fog, he saw a blurry face above a red dress and a lithe smooth leg bending gently towards his head. Confusedly, he started to suck and kept gazing until he recognized a woman’s face and acknowledged it was her foot inside his mouth. He did not know who the brunette on the bar stool was, but she seemed familiar. Johnny tried to make space for words.

“It backfired,” the brunette said as she shoved her foot deeper. Her toes bashed his throat and pushed the back of his head onto the bottom of the sofa. “You could have at least left some message… But then again, you have written so many books no one cared to read. Besides Lara… But she doesn’t really count. Why would it be any different with your goodbye letter…”

The writer’s neck hurt like hell. His body was sprawled over the floor, his legs spread over the upturned table. Next to it, little pieces of glass jutted from a puddle of whiskey. Johnny was grunting. He clutched her slender ankle with both hands in an attempt to push it back, but was way too weak. She pushed her leg further and her heel almost dived in. Johnny was choking while her foot bathed in saliva deep in his mouth.

After the incomplete victory of the Marne there followed the German retreat to the Aisne, the race to the sea for possession of the Channel ports, the fall of Antwerp, and the Battle of Ypres where officers and men of the BEF held their ground, fought literally until they died, and stopped the Germans in Flanders. Not Mons or the Marne but Ypres was the real monument to British valor, as well as the grave of four-fifths of the original BEF. After it, with the advent of winter, came the slow deadly sinking into the stalemate of trench warfare. Running from Switzerland to the Channel like a gangrenous wound across French and Belgian territory, the trenches determined the war of position and attrition, the brutal, mud-filled, murderous insanity known as the Western Front that was to last for four more years.

[...]

It was an error that could never be repaired. Failure of Plan 17 was as fatal as failure of the Schlieffen plan, and together they produced deadlock on the Western Front. Sucking up lives at a rate of 5,000 and sometimes 50,000 a day, absorbing munitions, energy, money, brains, and trained men, the Western Front ate up Allied war resources and predetermined the failure of back-door efforts like that of the Dardanelles which might otherwise have shortened the war. The deadlock, fixed by the failures of the first month, determined the future course of the war and, as a result, the terms of the peace, the shape of the interwar period, and the conditions of the Second Round.

Men could not sustain a war of such magnitude and pain without hope— the hope that its very enormity would ensure that it could never happen again and the hope that when somehow it had been fought through to a resolution, the foundations of a better-ordered world would have been laid. Like the shimmering vision of Paris that kept Kluck’s soldiers on their feet, the mirage of a better world glimmered beyond the shell-pitted wastes and leafless stumps that had once been green fields and waving poplars. Nothing less could give dignity or sense to monstrous offensives in which thousands and hundreds of thousands were killed to gain ten yards and exchange one wet-bottomed trench for another. When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting.

After the Marne the war grew and spread until it drew in the nations of both hemispheres and entangled them in a pattern of world conflict no peace treaty could dissolve. The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffre told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.

The Expatriates

"A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our "provisional existence" as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless. "

"Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say! —success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it."

By Markus zusak, The Book Thief

In the domain of thought, he is living in open conflict with himself; and in the domain of economic and political life, he is living in open conflict with others. He finds himself unable to control his ruthless egoism and his infinite gold-hunger, which is gradually killing all higher striving in him and brining him nothing but life-weariness. Absorbed in the "fact", that is to say, the optically present source of sensation, he is entirely cut off from the unplumbed depths of his own being.

From Sextus: a kindly disposition, and the pattern of a household governed by the paterfamilias; the concept of life lived according to nature; an unaffected dignity; intuitive concern for his friends; tolerance both of ordinary people and of the emptily opinionated; an agreeable manner with all, so that the pleasure of his conversation was greater than any flattery, and his very presence brought him the highest respect from all the company; certainty of grasp and method in the discovery and organization of the essential principles of life; never to give the impression of anger or any other passion, but to combine complete freedom from passion with the greatest human affection; to praise without fanfare, and to wear great learning lightly.

World War II, by most accounts, had important economic roots as well. The 1930s was a period of economic depression around the world. As economies collapsed, most countries adopted selfish strategies to try to boost employment. A common strategy was to increase barriers to imports in order to keep more jobs at home.

However, when every country took this strategy, world trade collapsed and all economies became less efficient.

Prior to World War I, Great Britain had played a leading role in organizing the world economy. Because of its considerable naval and financial power, it was able to facilitate greater trade around the world. This was seen as advantageous both to Great Britain and to other countries. The costs of World War I, however, substantially undermined Great Britain’s ability to play this role. The new big player in the world economy was the United States. However, largely as a result of the doctrine of isolationism, the U.S. government declined to take up Britain’s leadership role. As a result, there was no effective international collaboration to maintain trade under the stress of the Great Depression.

Among the educated Arab elite there is a pervasive historical melancholy about the lost Golden Age, the first four centuries after Arab armies overran the southern and eastern territories of the (by then Christian) Roman Empire in the latter 600s. As the Arab conquerors had the wit to retain and even improve upon the administrative and scientific accomplishments of the Greco-Roman cultures they now ruled, the early Arab empires were culturally, technologically and intellectually superior to any other civilization in western Eurasia except, perhaps, Byzantium (what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire after the conquests). The tide began to turn with the real start of the Christian reconquista in al Andalus (Muslim-ruled Spain) in the mid-eleventh century, although it took four more centuries to extinguish Muslim rule in all of Spain and Portugal. Around the same time, the Arabic-speaking parts of the Levant (Palestine, Syria, Iraq) were conquered by the Seljuk Turks, an Islamized pastoral people from Central Asia who originally spoke Turkish but used Persian as an administrative language. By the time that the First Crusade, a Western European campaign to recapture the formerly Christian lands on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, culminated in the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, the whole of the eastern Arab world was already under foreign rule. The resistance to the Crusaders was commanded mainly by Kurdish and Turkish leaders, not by Arabs.

The Crusades finally petered out in defeat with the fall of the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land in 1291, but by then a far greater calamity had struck the Arab world: the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, and indeed of all of Iraq, in 1258. (Iraq did not recover to its pre-Mongol level of population until the early twentieth century.) The Arab Golden Age was over, and no genuinely Arab regime again ruled over the agricultural heartland of the Arab world, from Egypt to Iraq, until the latter part of the twentieth century. Indeed, from the early sixteenth century on it was all part of the Ottoman Empire, and its rulers spoke Turkish.

Arab intellectuals know every bitter step in this story of decline and defeat. The great majority of ordinary Arabs don't know the details of the story, of course, but they are well aware that something went terribly wrong in Arab history a long time ago, and that it has been downhill ever since. The last century is particularly bitter, and is well remembered by all parties. The Arabs were promised independence by the British during the First World War (Lawrence of Arabia and all that) and duly revolted against Ottoman rule, only to discover that Britain and France had made a secret deal in 1916 to carve up the Arab world between themselves. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain got Iraq, Palestine and Jordan, and France got Syria and Lebanon (the British already had Egypt). Some Arabs refused to accept this carve-up, but their protests were crushed, and after 1918 there were once again no genuinely independent Arab countries except for a few impoverished sheikhdoms in the desert parts of Arabia.

After the Second World War ended in 1945 the European empires went into retreat, and during the 1950s and 1960s every Arab country got its independence (although some of them had to fight quite hard for it). The post-independence priority everywhere was not democracy but "modernization." These countries hungered desperately for prosperity and respect, and both seemed to be most readily attainable by following the Eastern European/Soviet model of rapid industrialization and educational uplift, which was doing quite well economically at the time. (Economic growth in Soviet-bloc countries did not fall behind the capitalist/democratic model until the later 1960s.) So a flock of young Arab military officers seized power from the kings and parliaments left behind by the departing imperial powers —Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Hafez al Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and so on—promising to deliver a rapid rise in both national power and individual living standards. They also promised to put an end to the Israeli state, which had fought its way into existence in the very heart of the Arab world, with much Western support, in 1948.

The new leaders failed everywhere. They failed militarily, losing further wars to Israel in 1956, 1967 and 1973, mainly because they lacked the organizational ability to take advantage of their vastly superior numbers: in every war from 1956 onwards, the Israelis actually had more troops on the battlefield than their Arab opponents (plus, of course, strong support from Britain and France, and later from the United States as well). They failed economically because they were military officers whose training had not prepared them in any way to run countries and manage economies. And even if they had had the right skills, the development model they adopted, which in the end did not work that well even in the "socialist" countries of Eastern Europe, was hopelessly inappropriate for countries with low literacy, low urbanization, almost no industrial or scientific establishment, strong tribal and clan identities, and deeply rooted patriarchal values. At any rate, they failed, and by the late 1970s it was clear to everybody that they had failed.

A six-paragraph tale of woe spanning almost a millennium, but it does explain why Arabs are so angry. They feel cheated by the West, by their own governments, by history. Even today there is little modern industry and almost no serious scientific research happening in the Arab countries. Average incomes (except in the few oil-rich states) are lower than in any other region of the world except sub-Saharan Africa—and on current trend lines will fall even below Africa's in another ten or fifteen years. Half the women in the Arab world are illiterate.

Pierce's arguments against metaphysical abstraction influenced the American philosophical movement knows as pragmatism, which philosopher and psychologist William James described as "looking away from first things: principles, 'categories', supposed necessities; and looking toward last things: fruits, consequences, facts". Pragmatism had affinities with the European philosophical movement known as logical positivism which help that any statement that cannot be verified empirically is either meaningless or nothing but a definition. This was the scientific method raised to a general theory of knowing. Eventually pragmatism's concentrationa on consequences and facts and positivism's insistent on verification became embodied in the celebrated Chicago journalistic maxim, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

"It's an old story, the relationship of Mexican intellectuals with power. I'm not saying they're all the same. There are some notable exceptions. Nor am I saying that those who surrender do so in bad faith. Or even that they surrender completely. You could say it's just a job. But they're working for the state. In Europe, intellectuals work for publishing houses or for the papers or their wives support them or their parents are well-off and give them a monthly allowance or they're laborers or criminals and they make an honest living from their jobs. In Mexico, and this might be true across Latin America, except in Argentina, intellectuals work for the state. It was like that under the PRI and it'll be the same under the PAN. The intellectual himself may be a passionate defender of the state or a critic of the state. The state doesn't care. The state feeds him and watches over him in silence. And it puts this giant cohort of essentially useless writers to use. How? It exorcises demons, it alters the national climate or at least tries to sway it. It adds layers of lime to a pit that may or may not exist, no one knows for sure. Not that it's always this way, of course. An intellectual can work at the university, or better, go to work for an American university, where the literature departments are just as bad as in Mexico, but that doesn't mean, they won't get a late-night call from someone speaking in the name of the state, someone who offers them a better job, better pay, something the intellectual think he deserves, and intellectuals always think they deserve better. This mechanism somehow crops the ears off Mexican writers. It drives them insane. Some, for example, will set out to translate Japanese poetry without knowing Japanese and others just spend their time drinking. Take Almendro - as far as I know he does both. Literature in Mexico is like a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club, if you follow me. The weather is good, it's sunny, you can go out and sit in the park and open a book by Valéry, possibly the writer most read by Mexican writers, and then you go over to a friend's house and talk. And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don't notice, but you have, you're missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become more apparent, wounded vanity, the desire for just once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it. The stage is really a proscenium and upstage there's an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. Onomatopoeic noises, syllables of rage or of seduction or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of lights and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium, and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile, the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads, they can't see anything. They only hear the sounds that come from deep in the mine. And they translate or reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they sense an earthquake, they try to be eloquent where they sense a fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there's only a deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they're incapable of imagining an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage on which they work is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows smaller and smaller with the passage of time. The shrinking of the stage doesn't spoil it in any way. It simply gets smaller and smaller and the hall gets smaller too, and naturally there are fewer and fewer people watching. Next to this stage there are others, of course. New stages that have sprung up over time. There's the painting stage, which is enormous, and the audience is tiny, though all elegant for lack of a better word. There's the film stage and the television stage. Here the capacity is huge, the hall is always full, and year after year the proscenium grows by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the performers from the stage where intellectuals give their talks are invited to perform on the television stage. On this stage the opening of the mine is the same, the perspective slightly altered, although maybe the camouflage is denser and, paradoxically, bespeaks a mysterious sense of humor, but it still sinks. The humorous camouflage, naturally, lends itself to many interpretations, which are finally reduced to two for the public's convenience or for the convenience of the public's collective eye. Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent residence on the television proscenium. The roars keep coming from the opening of the mine and the intellectuals keep misinterpreting them. In fact, they, in theory the masters of language, can't even enrich it themselves. Their best words are borrowings that they hear spoken by the spectators in the front row. These spectators are called flagellants. They're sick, and from time to time they invent hideous words and there's a spike in their mortality rate. When the workday ends the theaters are closed and they cover the openings of the mines with big sheets of steel. The intellectuals retire for the night. The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible. Songs can be heard in some bars, the notes reaching the street. Sometimes an intellectual wanders off course and goes into one of these places and drinks mezcal. Then he thinks what would happen if one day he. But no. He doesn't think anything. He just drinks an sings. Sometimes he thinks he sees a legendary German writer. But all he's really seen is a shadow, sometimes all he's seen is his own shadow, which comes home every night so that the intellectual won't burst or hang himself from the lintel. But he swears he's seen a German writer and his own happiness, his sense of order, his bustle, his spirit of revelry rest on that conviction. The next morning it's nice out. The sun shoots sparks but doesn't burn. A person can go out reasonably relaxed, with his shadow on his heels, and stop in a park and read a few pages of Valéry. And so on until the end."

"I don't understand a word you've said," said Norton.

"Really I've just been talking nonsense," said Amalfitano.

2004

Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not to much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

It is no exaggeration to state that in the classical culture of Tlön, there is only one discipline, that of psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have remarked that the men of that planet conceive of the universe as a series of mental processes, whose unfolding is to be understood only as a time sequence. Spinoza attributes to the inexhaustibly divine in man the qualities of extension and of thinking. In Tlön, nobody would understand the juxtaposition of the first, which is only characteristic of certain states of being, with the second, which is a perfect synonym for the cosmos. To put it another way - they do not conceive of the spatial as everlasting in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and, later, of the countryside on fire and, later, of a half-extinguished cigar which caused the conflagration would be considered an example of the association of ideas.

This monism, or extreme idealism, completely invalidates science. To explain or to judge an event is to identify or unite it with another one. In Tlön, such connection is a later stage in the mind of the observer, which can in no way affect or illuminate the earlier stage. Each state of mind is irreducible. The mere act of giving it a name, that is of classifying it, implies a falsification of it. From all this, it would be possible to deduce that there is no science in Tlön, let alone rational thought. The paradox, however, is that sciences exist, in countless number. In philosophy, the same thing happens as happens with the nouns in the northern hemisphere. The fact that any philosophical system is bound in advance to be a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, means that systems abound, unbelievable systems, beautifully constructed or else sensational in effect. The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. The consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to some one of them. Even the phrase "all the aspects" can be rejected, since it presupposes the impossible conclusion of the present moment, and of past moments. Even so, the plural, "past moments" is inadmissable, since it supposes another impossible operation ... One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory.* Another school declares that the whole of time has already happened and that our life is a vague memory or dim reflection, doubtless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process. Another school has it that the history of the universe, which contains the history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon. Another maintains that the universe is comparable to those code systems in which not all the symbols have meaning, and in which only that which happens every three hundredth night is true. Another believes that, whuile we are asleep here, we are awake somewhere else, and that thus every man is two men.

• Russell (The Analysis of Mind, 1921, page 159) conjectures that our planet was created a few moments ago, and provided with a humanity which "remember" an illusory past.

from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius" 1941

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances.

The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid's horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching an he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

1985

No self now, consciously speaking.

No feeling your old self or new self, false imaginings if you think about it, self-conscious nothings everywhere you look.

No one to hear you weep or scream, making a go of it on your own, bye-bye.

No bosom of nature, abandoned on the doorstep of the supernatural, minds full of flagrantly joyless possibilities, a real blunder that was, the human tragedy.

No reality to speak of, nobody here but us puppets, contradictory beings, mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox.

No immortality, ordinary folk and average mortals coming and going, can't stay long, got an appointment with nonexistence, no alternative to consider, being alive was all right while it lasted, so they say.

No life story with a happy ending to tell, only a contrivance of horror, then nothingness - and nothing else.

No Free Will-to-live, no redemption by a Will-to-die, how depressing.

No philosophies to peddle, pessimism a no-sale, optimism had to close its doors, too wicked to pass code.

No meaning or mind-games, repressional mechanisms broke down, self-deception shuttered its windows.

No awakening from a dream within a dream, mutation of consciousness - parent of all horrors, best not mess with it, extinction looking better all the time.

No more pleasure, what there was of it, a few crumbs left by chaos at feast, still a good supply of pain, though.

No praiseworthy incentives, just bowel-movement pressures, potato-mashing relativism.

No euthanasia, bad for business of life, you're on your own there, but watch out for the eternal return, most horrible idea in the universe.

No loving God, omnipotence off duty and omniscience on leave, the deity He dead - the horror, the horror, even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison, blame it on the piecing together of dissociated knowledge.

No compassionate Buddha, Body Snatchers got him, heard tell, or some kind of thing, maybe next lifetime.

No Good-versus-Evil formulas around here, Azahoth running the show, human beings a mistake or a joke, something pernicious making a nightmare of our world.

No being normal and real, the uncanny coming at you full speed, startling and dreadful.

No ego-death - enlightenment by accident.

No way out of harm's way, better never to have been, worst saved for last.

No Last Messiah, buried in the fingernails of midwives and pacifier makers, gone the way of messiahs past.

No bleakness either, a failure indeed.

No terror management by isolation, anchoring, distraction, sublimation.

No tragedies to read or to write, death kept at a safe distance past the vanishing point down the road.

No escape routes into a useless bliss, useless existence, malignantly so...

2010