Katabasis
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Read between October 4 - October 10, 2025
54%
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The upshot is, Hell’s not so bad for the people who are in it. They’re exactly where they wanted to be.”
63%
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Perhaps human intelligence was a mistake, and everyone who celebrated the escape from the Garden of Eden was wrong. Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.
69%
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Oh, why was this so hard? Alice wondered desperately. Why couldn’t she ever tell Peter what she thought? Always they had been bodies hurtling just out of one another’s orbit, when all it would have ever taken was an honest word. But that was precisely what magicians lacked; there were no honest words, only puns and illusions and constructions of reality so convoluted that you couldn’t keep track anymore of what was real and what wasn’t. Everyone was always trying so hard to pretend they were somebody else.
79%
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Now she understood Hell in full. She saw its intricate design; could understand that it was no random imitation of living rituals but a cruel mirror; that all its karmic reflection just was to show life’s worthlessness to begin with. The point was not rehabilitation but a stripping down to form, to show that humans were blindly writhing worms, rooting about to feel anything at all.
86%
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Life is an activity that’s got to be sustained. You have to fight for it. Otherwise it’s no life at all.
97%
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What a miracle a person was, she thought. They took up so little space. The difference between presence and absence was not even a square meter of matter.