The End of Loneliness

by Benedict Wells

All these nihilists and cynics are really just cowards. They act as if everything’s meaningless because that means ultimately there’s nothing to lose. Their attitude seems unassailable and superior, but inside it’s worthless.’

Life is not a zero-sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they do. Sometimes they’re fair and everything makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we question everything. I pulled the mask off the face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was chance.

Sometimes there just isn’t an answer: that’s the way it is. We humans have been left completely to our own devices down here. What sort of a world would it be, anyway, if every prayer were heard and we knew for certain that we’d carry on after death? What use would we have for life any more? We’d all be in Paradise already. Do you know the saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to catch fish, and you feed him for the whole of his life”? That’s exactly how this works. God wants us to learn to look after ourselves. He doesn’t give us the fish and hear all our prayers, but He listens to us and observes how we cope with everything down here – sickness, injustice, death and suffering. Life is there in order to learn how to fish.’

Because in a billion years, when everything’s gone and forgotten, when time has erased everything and there’s no proof any more of anything whatsoever, what reality was will be irrelevant.