Black death, cursed thing, wicked beast! I find no solace when I sleep; all I have are visions of what came before and what cannot come now. The delicate order that had blessed our miserable, restless lives—gone! Dashed away in an instant, like the Spartan defect against the rocks!
I see now that the precariousness of society—its silly little rituals, the arbitrary nature of custom, the ethereal quality of reason; how this precious binding can be so quickly undone!—it makes me shudder. It is a special thing for a man to gaze into the depths of his soul, to look into the vast universes of possibility; to have that terrible realization, which is inevitable as the rising sun, that he himself is the ultimate arbiter of his destiny. Like the stoics of yesteryear he realizes that discomfort and insecurity are only as powerful as he allows them to be; that he can choose at precisely any moment to cease feeling, to cease caring!
Such a thing is a precious event, the metaphysical and metaphorical piercing of the veil—now our hero only sees life and society for what it truly is: a farce! What buffoonery must his eyes bear witness to! The sweet smelling perfumes of ignorance, the bubbling liquors of unknowing—all rendered impotent (and irreversibly so, save for small pockets of time in which he might find work or chore to occupy himself completely with) in the ugly face of the truth! Our man trembles helplessly in the face of his impotency, in the face of his godhood: how can it be that one can be imprisoned by absolute freedom?
How can one unsee the true nature of existence? That life has ceased to be about living, but about surviving? In this sense our wanton hero finds his mouth agape in horror, for he now knows that the only true nihilist is a dead nihilist, that authentic living can only be accomplished in solitude, or in the company of a small enclave of like-minded individuals and family and lovers.“What is that this idiot means to say, then,” you must be asking yourself. Patience, dear reader, and forgive my bluster and bravado! The thesis will come as it must, just as a stomach must hunger and an infant must cry.
This realization that society begets itself, that its evolution and perpetuation exist at the cost of the individual and his dreams, and his ambitions, it is heartbreaking! He weeps as Romeo does over the body of his beloved; but, only the tragic hero, we have a choice! The bitter poison of reality and absolutism, the same poison that kills our dear Romeo, can be draught and swallowed by our protagonist, cork and all—or, he can live his life in agony, willing his naiveté to return, shaking his ignorance awake just as Romeo thrashes his seemingly dead lover. Most men who unwittingly fallen into the abyss choose the latter.
Those that choose the former, these are the titans of our lives! These are the übermensch that we spend a lifetime trying to hopelessly emulate! These are the men, upon the realization that, in order to live within a society, one must submit to the necessity of practicality, that they must sacrifice a part of their agency, a part of their intellect, a part of themselves in order to live comfortably and protect the means by which they eke a standard of living. Each individual possesses the absolute freedom to do whatever it is that their heart desires!; whether or not they are successful in their endeavors, however, is a different matter entirely.
Man is only slave to the laws of the universe and his biology; he cannot will himself to fly without artificial means, he cannot will himself from wasting away should he refuse to eat or drink, he cannot will others to bend their knee in his service. Only he can lord and impose this dictatorship over himself; and yet he is still constrained by mortality and the trappings of humanity!
Few of the nameless faces that make up a community, let alone a society, ever comes to this realization, save for times of great crisis—like the current bout of insanity we find ourselves in now! Pray, tell, how does one attempt to herd a flock of sheep who realize that the shepherd is no greater than they are? How does one take a dye casted out of the river?
The answer of course, is that such a feat is impossible! And yet, when the present madness ends, when all the debris has been tidied up and all the bodies have been stacked, the people shall seemingly return to a state prior to the present condition, that is to say, a state of unknowing and ignorance.
But the demons of Medusa’s box are not so easily quarantined! In the quiet hours of the night, as they toss and turn trying to sleep, they will think, and they will remember. They will know what they saw in the darkest parts of their mind, how they cleared out the cobwebs and blew the dust out of the least visited portions of their unconsciousness: and they will wonder, and they will know that the man next to him has done the same, and the man beside them has done the same, and they will all share in this burden of truth. Yet, they will continue to go about acting as if no such epiphany had taken place, either here, elsewhere, or all about society.
And it is this performance, and the actors’ knowledge that it is a performance, that it all exists as drudgery and travesty, this is what drives the sane man mad! To know that your neighbor knows that you know you could change your life at any given moment, to know that he knows that you know the same of him, it is an ouroboros of twisted logic!
I have not left my home, as ordered by the Governor, in two fortnights. Though I can feel the same sun shine on my skin as my fellows, and though I can still feel the same flesh that they do when we shake hands, I know that I am not here in the way that they believe me to be. This body is a vessel, a prison, a coffin: no amount of knowledge can save me from my ultimate doom, no study of physical character or analysis of biochemical impulses can change the fact that I am both a slave and master that inhabit the same space, the same body, the same mind.
I grow tired of this existence; I grow tired of this effort! I barely eat any more than what is required to sustain me—of sustenance, I have eaten no more than two-and-a-half loaves of bread, three-quarters block of cheese, and a vine of grapes since this ordeal began. I sleep to pass the time, and yet I am still exhausted when the sun sets and my fellows prepare themselves for bed. I have not written anything besides this and I do nothing but sit, staring out of the windows on the second story of this accursed bastion, eyes glazed over and gaze unbroken like some undead sentry.
Release me from this madness! From this torment! What I would give to live the rest of my days as a fool, to while a life away yearning and complaining and performing as the rest of these idiots do! Damned Appleseed of Eden, uproot yourself from my soul! Please! Please! Please!
