No Longer Will You Be

We've Forgotten Much. How To Struggle, How To Rise To Dizzy Heights And Sink To Unparalleled Depths. We No Longer Aspire To Anything. Even The Finer Shades Of Despair Are Lost To Us. We've Ceased To Be Runners. We Plod From Structure To Conveyance To Employment And Back Again. We Live Within The Boundaries That Science Has Determined For Us. The Measuring Stick Is Short And Sweet. The Full Gamut Of Life Is A Brief, Shadowy Continuum That Runs From Gray To More Gray. The Rainbow Is Bleached. We Hardly Know How To Doubt Anymore. (“the Thing”)

In A World Of Monotonous Horror There Could Be No Salvation In Wild Dreaming. Horror He Had Adjusted To. But Monotony Was The Greater Obstacle, And He Realized It Now, Understood It At Long Last. And Understanding It Seemed To Give Him A Sort Of Quiet Peace, A Sense Of Having Spread All The Cards On His Mental Table, Examined Them, And Settled Conclusively On The Desired Hand.

What Condemnation Could Possibly Be More Harsh Than One’s Own, When Self-pretense Is No Longer Possible?

Memory Was Such A Worthless Thing, Really. Nothing It Dealt With Was Attainable. It Was Concerned With Phantom Acts And Feelings, With All That Was Uncapturable Except In Thought. It Was Without Satisfaction.

He Pretended It Was The Only Thing That Kept Him From It. But, Far Back In His Mind, He Wondered If He Could Write Anything. Often The Question Threw Itself At Him When He Was Least Expecting It. You Have Four Hours Every Morning, The Statement Would Rise Like A Menacing Wraith. You Have Time To Write Many Thousands Of Words. Why Don't You? And The Answer Was Always Lost In A Tangle Of Becauses And Wells And Endless Reasons That He Clung To Like A Drowning Man At Straws.