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He watched Penny sleeping a long time. It was not happiness, nor was it contentment that filled him and I up. It was something else, the finger of some distant deity reaching out for one’s own, the entirety of the world manifested for just a moment with a face. It was a certain knowledge that whatever was beyond that bed, beyond that room, was far inferior to just watching this woman sleep.
But on that morning in bed with Penny he was made frightfully aware that the former sensations had been cheap imitations. Less. This was something else: a purpose and a shrine to worship at.
Ageing is backwards. One begins in (sometimes) perfect health and with absolutely no idea what to use it for. The world is strange and its mechanisms are strange. Meaning is in short supply and distractions are everywhere. Then one begins to learn who they actually are, noticing there are passions and proclivities buried down inside and can be teased out. There is a meaning after all and it swims leisurely into focus as the years wander past.
I fear that on my last day, on my deathbed, that is when the meaning of things will enter the room and kiss my forehead and whisper into my ear what it was I should have done with my life, and how I should've conducted myself. Hell isn't a fire pit but a museum of regrets.
Suicide is not a choice, but rather a consequence of having no choices left. A mInd has the choice to alter itself, and so it will always choose to do so in a sunny or at least beige direction.
By this period in the mother planet's history it had become right to grant any being with some semblance of independent thought full control over its own life—be it biological or not. How could one justify the confiscation of a right as basic as self-extinction?
An almost-infinity elapsed and in that time there were no wars and nothing died. There was pain if it was chosen and there was difficulty if it was desired. Otherwise, bliss held over the world in a perfect honeyed chord that never grew boring and always endured.
In its killing of unpleasantness, mInd culture had also killed the possibility of aspiration and bravery. And in any culture, man or machine, aspiration and bravery will always be the hallmarks of the young and occasionally the stupid.
You've all been shaken up, that's obvious, that's to be expected. There's a thing in the world that you don't know and just like children you keep putting your hand in the fire to see if it's still hot. That approach has brought nothing but death and stupefaction and I wish you'd stop it. Look on the world, look on what we know and what we can manipulate. Look on how we've built a great garden where nothing ages or dies. Yet present you with three forbidden fruits, be they apples or dates, rotten or not, and you all lose your minds. This is not wise.
I looked behind. A woman had come in, perhaps mid-thirties. She sat alone at the other side of the bar, reading. “She has lived a fairly dull life, full of waiting. Waiting for the right relationship, the right career. This was all in vain, of course, as she’ll be killed in a welding accident two and a half months from now down on the Construction Deck.”
“You haven’t recovered from the breakdown of your marriage. You never will. You’re constantly waiting for a promotion to the Craftman’s Deck. It will come, two and a half years from now, but the work will be hard and the pay won’t be much better and even though you’ll regret taking the position, you will remain in it due to your, frankly, excessive pride. You will die thirty years, seven months, four days, and ten hours from now in a—” “Please don’t,” I said. “—decompression accident aboard a voidskipper bound for Ithaca. As your lungs explode and your blood boils you will think very quickly
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In other words, a man can choose to follow his passions, but not choose what his passions are.
Lomese is the only language in the galaxy with seventeen versions of thank you and no imperatives. That is, it is very easy to show gratitude and almost impossible to command anyone to do anything. Instead, on Lom, one learns to put things very gently. Perhaps you could take my bags up to the room? I would love to purchase your house. Now it is time for you to fucking die, I’m afraid.
Beauty is nice and virtue is attractive, but nothing is more gorgeous than meeting another creature who shares your deepest values.
Let’s pause for a second and acknowledge how easy it is to love from afar. One might see this person three or four times a week, and always in situations where difficulties needn’t crop up. Since the two of you never face a challenge, it is possible to imagine the object of your affection to be free of pettiness, stupidity, self-obsession, and all the other frequent visitors to the human psyche.
In those secret moments, brushing your teeth, walking home from work, you may tell yourself that if only the two of you could be together then nothing would ever hurt again. And since you refuse to admit your affections to this person, you may now live out the rest of your life in a constant and quietly sad state of What if? Inaction is the primary refuge of those who prefer their own constructed realities to the beautiful chaos of the real world.
With Nadastra walking on that sun-kissed street, her children in tow, her husband attractive and noble-looking, Dr. Ek saw clearly then that the problem wasn’t with marriage as a whole. It wasn’t with shyness or romance. It wasn’t even with the inability to pursue one’s dreams. The problem was contentment.
She examined a pad on the desk and said, “I have the Office of Oversight report here. Thoughts outside of marriage. That’s quite natural. The crime isn't thinking them, it's hiding them. You know that of course. Get all the thoughts out all the time. Would you like me to correct the invasive thoughts for you?”
“People who spend all their time taking photos will just remember taking photos. Souvenirs only make you think of buying them, don’t they.”
He thought she was stupid. He thought she was clever. It is always like this with idealists. One scorns their passion, all the while secretly admiring their passion.
“I do not want to take any more photos. I don’t like photos. I don’t want to remember any of this horseshit. What the fuck are we doing with all this? Trying to make celebrities of ourselves, everyone screaming down everyone’s throat and no one stopping to shut up. I don’t like photos. I don’t want any more taken of me.”
One passage in particular caught his eye: All explanations are an attempt by humankind to divide itself from the world. An explanation without including the explainer is as a tree without the trunk. One is inseparable from the other. No system of knowledge can avoid this limitation. Numbers are not the true face of measure. Words are not the true description of things. The world is the explanation.
“They live for about four hundred days. They choose a queen. She doesn't have babies, but she can give orders. She orders them all about to pick things up and bring them back. They build a mound together and inside they fill it with the best sticks and pebbles they can find. And when it's perfect, when they've built the perfect home and everything's just right, do you know what they do?” “No.” “They die.”
A thing appeared in him, small at first. He might've called it reassurance but it wasn't that. The feeling was grey, the colour of true wisdom. Everything will go to hell, the feeling said. And that's okay. He thought of the death of the empire, of the death of everything his species had tried to build, and the horror was gone. If the Great Goodnight happened, so be it. The world was just a totality of facts. Nothing had a goodness or a badness about it. Thinking only made it so and now he saw the world clearly, just for a moment, free of the veil of judgement. It was a beige relief and a pure
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“All seeds contain the tree they will become. In that seed is the limit of its growth. No amount of water or nurture or love can grow a tree taller than the seed has allowed. If it is pushed to grow taller or wider than that, then it will die slowly. It will die of itself. Most things in the universe fade this way. If a tree is to survive then it must make itself content with its height and hide. It must hide its pride and limit its curiosity, lest it birth the end of everything.”
“There is a special problem in communications theory. We call it ‘narrative collapse’. When a planet is very connected, a time inevitably arrives when it becomes difficult to work out what is actually going on. Video and audio can be faked. Testimony isn’t reliable. All truths fall into a relative flatness. This is more dangerous than any doomsday weapon. You have a king and, if you don’t mind me saying so, not a very nice one. But at least his population knows when he’s being deceitful or harsh. On my world and the sister world we’ve lost even that.
“Oh, it goes without saying there will be no returning to Al’Hazaad in the event of a failure. You will be expected to end your own life. If you have children, we will execute them. If you don’t have children, we will make children from your blood cultures, then execute them.”
Along with the surprise of this little intimacy I was reminded of another emotion; The Fear. In those rare moments when another human piques your interest, it is accompanied by the quiet panic that you, and only you, are invested so deeply and so quickly. Maybe for them it's just a passing game or fancy, and in an hour or so they'll go back to their life and never think of you again.
It’s funny, you don’t convince the living to behave in a proper way, you just wait for them to die and hope their children grow up a little kinder and wiser than their parents.
As far as I’m aware there has never been a point in history when a village, a society, or a planet has come together for a day and said, “What is it we’re all going after?” There has never been a vote about our collective purpose. Either a whole society is subject to the dictates of one mad ruler who imposes their vision on the whole, or the society is self-driven and strives after its own ends individually, among the whole. Why is there never an objective? And now I think about it, if there were, what would it even be?
The answer is perhaps the same for us here at the end of history as it was for our ancestors millions of years ago at the beginning: to live well, to live quietly, and to die without too much of a fuss. And if we are very, very lucky, to love properly at least once.
