Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Prologue



It may be that the chapters before this one were fictions devised for your amusement, and in no way represent the true order of things.  It may be that the author is a liar, as all authors end up being.  Storytellers are as false as the stories they tell, and I am, like all people, a teller of stories.  One thing leads into another, and in the end both truth and falsehood are combined into either a single great lie, or else a single great truth.  It remains for the reader to decide whether all falsehoods amount to a great truth, or whether all truths amount to a great falsehood.  One thing is certain.  Other People, like the stories they tell, are to be treated with caution.

It may be that it is March 30, 2041, and I am only typing this into a great computer, which is no more and no less that the great Library, fastened or stapled into our moldering bones from the outset.

It may be that every man is only half of some other man, and that through the combination of their errors they amount to a being sufficiently equipped for its environment.  It may be that every man is only half of some woman, and through their union the likeness of a human being is achieved.  In both of the above hypotheses lies the assumption that people are only half alive, or else half dead, and thus incomplete from the beginning.  Whether man is added to woman, or woman is added to man, or one sex is joined to itself, both only add up to half a human being, and half a human being is never enough to withstand Infinity.

It may be that the missing plane has been discovered in the Indian Ocean, and that relatives of the victims remain unconvinced with regard to official explanations of the tragedy.

Or it may be that each of us is gifted with a soul.  We may have within us some divine spark which outshines our mortality.  We may have within us some eternal member, or else some eternal membership which outstrips the presumed extinction of our race.  The human race dies for each of us when we stop being.  It does not matter whether or not we all accompany one another into the great enigma.  If we have a soul, it might be a source of hope.  If we have a soul, and if God is an angry God, then this soul might be a source of despair.  To play with spiritual cosmologies is easy.  To rest upon living and dying in the midst of forever is hard.

It may be that I sit in another room, wondering what happened to my friend the professor.  I went to his house after I heard the news.  I couldn’t find him.  I never heard from him again.  I never hear from him again.  I will never hear from him again.

It may be that an unselfish love exists.  It may be that altruism is possible.  It may even be that altruism is an evolutionary imperative.  It may be that one man can sacrifice himself for another man.  It may be that men who even question the existence of sacrifice are, by definition, not women.  It may be that women have an inborn understanding of love, and this is what men seek more than the temporary immortality of women’s bodies.  It may be, it may be.

It may be that the protesters still occupy the Legislature, and the President’s attempts at appeasement have failed.  His party is in for a rough election soon, and the tensions between the two nations remain high.  They like to show him in the newspaper with that grimace on his face, as if he had been embarrassed yet again.

But whatever may be, whatever might have been, is already past.  I write these words for those dead, and perhaps for those not yet living.  The story has been undone, and we are left with the future.  This future has also left us behind.  Whether through the reading of a single book like this one, or through an infinitude of other individual actions, the world of humanity has come to an end, and we are left in the mists of time, searching for purchase in a sea of indescribable possibilities.

It may be that I have never met the professor.  I compose his story through hearsay.  I composed his story from said heard things.  I will construct his narrative with the aid of second handed information.

It may be that I can see a future without men, and without women.  It may be that the world has kept spinning, and some form of life yet lives.  All creatures are only better or worse adapted to their environment, and Man was one.

It may be that I see that building where he found the book, opened to the page that unwrote everything that came before.  It may be that the room remains in an empty city, where not a single human soul stirs the dust with restless feet.

It may be that I am gone.

It may be that the Words of Trismegistus are still there, for those who will read them.  It may be that some other creature will evolve to take our place, to take up the mantle of sentience, and thereupon to question, fail, and occasionally succeed.  It may be that those creatures will discover what has been written here, and the hour of discovery will seal their own fate.  In knowing the unknowable, they will pass on.  In seeing what ought not to be seen, they will be seen no more.

It may be that this book sits within the room, a skeleton standing guard before it.  Some other creature will wonder over this skeleton, the mortal relic, and will pause to meditate upon other eons, before its kind ever saw the sun through hazy skies.  It may be that in the book they will seek an answer to this skeleton, and this room, and this empty city, now buried beneath several feet of earth.  It may be that the book puts a skeleton in every age, so that some will come looking, and so that no one race will outlive its usefulness.

It may be that ants have assumed lordship over the Earth.  That is if they have not done so already.  It may be that some other, more efficient insect has done so.  It may be that some kind of mammal has survived – something sufficiently alien to ourselves – and has carried on with the business of survival.

It may be that the world stands remade, as on the First Day, and that whatever God may or may not exist is surveying the aftereffects of His Armageddon.  It may be that it is a world without cities, or cars, or traffic jams, or highways, or telephones, or books, or words, or coffee cups, or convenience stores, or the Internet, or textbooks, or clothes, or shame.

And it may be that this world is heaven, for it has vindicated us all.  In death, how could we be blamed?

But look here, I see one of the creatures writing a letter, and it is the first letter of my name.  My name is Trismegistus, and I have been a man, I have read the book, and I have ended it all here.

The Ending of the Beginning, Begun Here.

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