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Our minds shape reality ... that is why superstitious peasants burn witches, jealous lovers murder their beloved, and lonely veterans put nooses around their necks.
The shanty sung of the Seven Ziggurats but left out the ramshackle dwellings, praised the bosoms of Kilayan women but skipped the emaciated beggars on the roadside, rhapsodized over the city’s unique aroma of spices, perfume, and the sea’s breeze but failed to mention the dashes of sweat, piss, and shit.
The poor at the bottom, the rich at the top, and a road leading from one to the other.
No more brothels, he resolved, with all the conviction of a drunk declaring his final, “this-time-for-real!” goodbye to the bottle.
“His ambition and constant fear of someone taking away his livelihood, they’ve made him forget his place in the world. And that’s exactly what the Corruption is, isn’t it? The voices in our head that constantly try to lead us away from virtue.”
“Can we blaze another one?” she asked, holding up the pipe. “That stuff was bloody fantastic.”
Here, the proportions of the depicted figures were skewed, their necks as long as arms, their arms as thin as fingers, and their eyeballs too far apart.
He tried the sleeping chambers next, but all he found were two corpses dining at the table by the entrance, scraping their food-sticks over empty plates. One of them wore prayer rings around her upper arms and had a decayed alapu on her lap; the other had rusted metal legs and a chunky gold amulet. Bile shooting into Jespar’s throat, he couldn’t hold back a gasp. The corpses turned their heads and looked at him, their lips moving but no sounds coming out.
Fear had many shades: there was the blazing kind you felt when an enemy charged at you; the chilly kind you felt traversing a dark alley; the harrowing kind when you were trapped in a cave during a blizzard, hoping someone heard your screams. To Jespar, however, the worst had always been the pernicious and silent kind, like when you suddenly realized your little sister hadn’t left her room all day and how eerily quiet the house was.
When all he gets is more blinking, the man realizes it’s pointless. Whatever potential this creature once had, he snuffed it when he chose the wine bottle over hard work, laziness over discipline, surrender over ambition. He took the easy way, and now he’s just a mangy cur waiting to be put out of his misery.
“Think of a farmer. Like most of us, he dreams of movin’ up the Road, and with the little patch of land his folks left him, he’s even got a chance. He’s a decent fellow, and his soil grows good fruit, so he easily makes enough to feed hisself and his family.” He held up his index finger. “But then somethin’ happens: the people like his fruit so much his market stalls are empty by midday. What’s he to do? Right, he buys more land and hires a helper so he can grow and pluck twice as much fruit. It all goes well till the farmer realizes that, with the helper’s wage, every basketful he sells only
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Like pebbles forming a rockslide.
in politics, human life was all too often an expendable resource, a stock of pawns to sacrifice on the chessboard.
“Then, you’re either extremely idealistic or extremely naïve.” “Or maybe you have a reductionist view of people.”
“What I believe in are monstrous actions. We are so obsessed with labels as if there were some kind of, I don’t know, mystical scale in our souls that tilts one way or the other and makes us either a saint or a monster. Tell me, if a woman murders a man, cuts him into pieces, and then feeds his flesh to her pets, does that make her a monster?”
“Then what if that man she butchered was also a wonderful father to his children, who will now starve to death in the streets?” “I get your point. The world is messy, and it isn’t always black and white.” “It isn’t, but that’s not what I was getting at. My point is, all these discussions about good and evil, where do they ever lead? A man is dead, and three children were orphaned. No amount of moral judgment and labeling will change that. Instead, we should ask ourselves what factors led to this situation and then work on improving those. Cause and effect, that’s all that matters.”
A bizarre thought crossed Jespar’s mind: who will take care of her pets now?
Tae ite nū’iwilo, tae hūnā ‘o. ‘You won’t find out if you give up.’ Because that is what it comes down to with melancholia and despair: just as other people lie when they tell you things always get better, your mind lies when it tells you they won’t. The only way to know is to stay and find out ... as hard as it might be.”
But when intention and result always ended up on opposite ends of the spectrum, who wouldn’t start asking questions?
If this past week had proven anything, it was that humans had far less control over their minds than they believed.
The brain made decisions before one even knew it, and free will was a lie. In the end, one was just a puppet reacting to whatever grew from the seeds life randomly tossed into the soil of the mind.
A silly loss of perspective, that was all. Nothing worth wasting his breath on. Then why did it hurt so fucking much?
He rolled onto the other side, then onto his stomach, then onto his back—the choreography of the insomniac.
People were so quick to point at all those inspiring stories of catharsis, completely ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the broken never beat their demons, that the drunkard’s son stayed with the bottle, the war widow never conquered her loneliness, and the defiled child never wiped that imagined black stain from their soul. Because in a world that worshipped the victorious, who the hell wanted to hear about the defeated?
