Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Chapter Forty Eight


Having read, I closed the book.  Reading, I close the book.  Reading on, I will close the book and return no more.
 
        I can feel it working now.  I can feel the great Undoing.  So many stories unwinding like balls of thread.  So many lives unraveling.  I am a spider at the center of their web.  They do not know that I have struck them from the beginning.  You also, you do not feel the beginning of the end.

        But as I now return this book to its jeweled case, this case wherein it will reside evermore, I feel a sense of great and unparalleled satisfaction.  The world makes mistakes sometimes, and I was the greatest mistake of all.  Having now read the words that undo all other words, having ripped out my pages from the book of all pages, I can sit quietly, and await oblivion.  The world does indeed make mistakes, but it also admits correction.

        You might wonder as you sit there, seconds before the End of the World, how this has come to be.  You might wonder why we all have to disappear, to die.  I will tell you why.  No man or woman sits apart in this world, and even the loneliest of souls are never truly alone.  We are all a part of one another’s stories, and this is why you must all join me in nothingness.  Yes, every man, woman, and child –conjoined in our Absence.

        And you don’t need to cry over this.  You don’t need to bemoan your fate.  It will be as if you have never been.  Why then cry over a future you never had, or a past you never will have?  There is a freedom in Negation.  It is a freedom from possibilities.

        My eyes fill with tears to think of it.  No more me.  No more her.  No more death.  No more life.  For all of us, freedom, and most of you will be gone before you have even finished this sentence.

        I return the Words of Trismegistus to the floorboards.  There to await some other days, when some other things that call themselves thinking will discover this spot, and discover that in their own tales, which they bite with rage, lies the remedy.

        Not the end of the universe, I think.  We are not that far gone into our interdependence.  Just the death of a species, and perhaps those stunted animals we call familiar.  Nevertheless an end to this world, and an end to this story.  Not bit by bit, but life by life, and without remembering.  The monuments we leave behind will be interpreted incorrectly.  Our tombstones will weather.

        And later on, not even the relics of our lordship will persist.  Only a false impression.

        Oh wife, why did you set me on this path?  Now that it is too late to turn from it?  If only you had been faithful.  If only I had never been born.  If only my father hadn’t been so fond of telling stories that he gave life to one more.  If only, if only.  If only we hadn’t crawled out of the sea.  If only we hadn’t been doomed to rush on, purposelessly, into other stories.  If only my hand could have been restrained from this.

        I wonder

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