Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

I have developed a visceral dislike of being watched while I write, not just because the content might be private, but because all the things one does while writing that are not actually writing—stretching, looking out into space, browsing the internet—seem somehow shameful if they’re monitored by others. The feeling of being watched induces an intolerable self-consciousness.

The secret was that all our ends and purposes were meaningless, that the truth of existence lay in a sort of ceaseless impersonal violence, merciless and without affect of any kind. This violence was not tragic or heroic or awful or arousing or just or unjust. It simply was.

Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?

Searching for feelings is like being the lookout on a ship, shining a lantern into thick fog. Objects that appear close at hand recede into the murk, or reveal themselves as chimeras. Somewhere off the port bow are icebergs.

I believe everyone has a place, a mental laboratory where we experiment with thoughts that are too strange or fragile to expose. I believe that we need to preserve it, in order to feel human. It is shrinking, its scope reduced by technologies of prediction and control, by social media’s sinister injunction to share.

I stroked her shoulder and felt a vast gulf between us, formed out of all the days when we had not been together, the days of my absence and the days before I knew her, when she had said and done things I would never find out about. I could touch her, brush my fingers over her skin, but it was like touching the surface of some mysterious ancient stone. Inside, Rei stretched away to infinity, a galaxy of unseen stars.

Homme seul est viande à loups, as the medieval French proverb has it. Alone, we are food for the wolves. That’s how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone.