The House at the End of the World

by Dean Koontz

She has thought of this place as the house at the end of the world, her world.

In addition to the three mortal fears—of terrible pain and disability and death—everyone needs at least one additional reason to live, a task that inspires.

Failure to be prepared is a failure to hope.

“Do you really believe the past is past? I think the past might be our future, that we’re busy laying the groundwork for new Dachaus, new Auschwitzes, all in the name of compassion, progress, justice, prosperity. Of the hard lessons that humanity learns, how many are retained? How very few? The passion of angry ideologues, the ignorance of the arrogant, the ferocity of utopians—how can such people lead the world to anything but its end?”

Life has taught her that it’s mentally exhausting and spiritually depressing to waste energy and time fanning the flames of anger when the reason for her outrage is someone who can’t be affected by anything she does or some malignant force in society that, when challenged, will engulf her and dissolve her in a metastatic frenzy. Patience, steadiness, and hope are healthier than anger; therefore, in spite of evidence to the contrary, she still trusts that the world has been shapen to a purpose and that the purpose is not the triumph of evil.

Fear is useful when it’s on a leash, Avi once said, but it’s always a bad dog when you let it run free in your mind.

Idle hours are sharp; they open new wounds in the heart and prick the mind with anxiety.

Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance. She does not believe that any political ideology can shape society into a utopia. She knows that, instead, even the most earnest utopians always and everywhere create horrific dystopias. She does not believe that scientists are always honest, that rapidly advancing technology will inevitably save us, that everything that is called “progress” is in fact progress. She knows that “experts” are often frauds, that “intellectuals” can be as ignorant as anyone, and that those who most strenuously signal their virtue and are celebrated for it will always prove to be among the most corrupt. Such innate clearheadedness ensures that comforting illusions will elude her, though there are times, as now, when she might welcome the comfort of them.

You can refuse to give up, but nonetheless be broken in the process of not surrendering.

What good is genius without humility? What value does it have if it isn’t married undivorceable to kindness and empathy?

“We can’t give in to evil, to those who do such things, because what they want is us to go still and quiet and never speak back to them. These past two years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to speak back and haven’t been doing a good job of it. My Avi used to say, ‘Always keep moving. The Fates are master sharpshooters, and the easy target is the one who’s standing still.’ By ‘keep moving,’ he also meant keep telling the truth, keep doing what’s right, keep believing what you do matters, because when you give up on the truth, you become one of them.”

As a girl who has journeyed through a few hundred books, she has become an insightful reader. People are books of a kind, each one a story. Sometimes, with no more than a glance or a gesture or a poignant word, they turn a page for you and reveal a deeper truth about themselves than you’ve seen before.