A Defrocked Academic
Mystic
"We could not live if we were wholly alive to all the ugliness of the world."
- Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock, "The Myth of Punch"
- Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock, "The Myth of Punch"
Pessimistic Passage of the Day...
- Thread starter Bleak&Icy
- Start date
cannibal cop
Grimscribe
More life meant more death—that’s what it finally came down to. The awful fecundity of the world, the terrifyingly long reach of life and its death accompaniment seemed to him a perversion. Every birth seemed to take place within a flowering of rot….
There was no escaping it. More life meant more death, and what did it matter that your child died as long as you yourself survived?…
Friends, families meant nothing. So much death in life, so much terror of both—the mathematics were unacceptable, yet inescapable.
– Steve Rasnic Tem, Ice House Pond
There was no escaping it. More life meant more death, and what did it matter that your child died as long as you yourself survived?…
Friends, families meant nothing. So much death in life, so much terror of both—the mathematics were unacceptable, yet inescapable.
– Steve Rasnic Tem, Ice House Pond
cannibal cop
Grimscribe
He hurried by the chicken coop, seeing the bobbing necks of the hens and roosters as they gawked with alarm at his passing. Their wings spread and beat out a flurry of feathers that were like snowflakes on the air. He could not escape their agate eyes. He paused long enough to open the pen and calm their squawking. They assembled between his legs, covering his own ankles with their plumage.
“Shh,” he told them, “it’s all right, we’re all all right,” and did not believe it.
They observed him indifferently, the few remaining feathers on their scrawny bodies settling back into place.
His eyes filled with tears.
As he knelt one small chicken, his favorite, flew onto his knee. He stroked its piebald head and kissed its beak. The others tiptoed away to scratch at the hard dirt, and as the flock parted he saw a shape on the ground by the water trough.
It was the oldest and plumpest of the hens, lying on one side with her claws curled inward. Her feathers rippled and lifted.
He rose to a crouch and crept closer. He wondered how long she had been dead. It couldn’t have been very long, but already an army of ants had established a supply trail in and out of the open mouth, where the tongue protruded like a pink arrow.
He extended his arm to touch her, and immediately snatched his hand away as if she were hot. Damp feathers fell aside. The wrinkled skin was teeming with maggots, busily transforming the carcass into something he did not want to see.
He gagged and hid his face.
Who would take care of her chicks now? He reached behind the perch and found her nest. This time there were no peeps, no tiny pecks at his fingers. That was good. She had left no little ones behind. He felt the polished roundness of an egg. Gently he lifted it out.
The egg was smooth as porcelain but oddly soft. And cold. He cupped it gingerly in his hand and raised it to the dying light.
The shell was full-sized but not all of it had hardened properly. Part of the surface was nearly transparent, little more than a stretched membrane. He looked closer. Barely covered by the thin cellular wall was a distorted malformed embryo. It was unlike any chick he had ever seen before, an error of nature mutated in vitro. Its congealed, elongated eye stared back at him through a delicate lace of veins.
William shuddered. Crying silently, he replaced the egg in the nest and covered it with straw. There, he thought, you won’t have anything to worry about now. Maybe it’s better this way, after all.
– Dennis Etchison, The Woman in Black
“Shh,” he told them, “it’s all right, we’re all all right,” and did not believe it.
They observed him indifferently, the few remaining feathers on their scrawny bodies settling back into place.
His eyes filled with tears.
As he knelt one small chicken, his favorite, flew onto his knee. He stroked its piebald head and kissed its beak. The others tiptoed away to scratch at the hard dirt, and as the flock parted he saw a shape on the ground by the water trough.
It was the oldest and plumpest of the hens, lying on one side with her claws curled inward. Her feathers rippled and lifted.
He rose to a crouch and crept closer. He wondered how long she had been dead. It couldn’t have been very long, but already an army of ants had established a supply trail in and out of the open mouth, where the tongue protruded like a pink arrow.
He extended his arm to touch her, and immediately snatched his hand away as if she were hot. Damp feathers fell aside. The wrinkled skin was teeming with maggots, busily transforming the carcass into something he did not want to see.
He gagged and hid his face.
Who would take care of her chicks now? He reached behind the perch and found her nest. This time there were no peeps, no tiny pecks at his fingers. That was good. She had left no little ones behind. He felt the polished roundness of an egg. Gently he lifted it out.
The egg was smooth as porcelain but oddly soft. And cold. He cupped it gingerly in his hand and raised it to the dying light.
The shell was full-sized but not all of it had hardened properly. Part of the surface was nearly transparent, little more than a stretched membrane. He looked closer. Barely covered by the thin cellular wall was a distorted malformed embryo. It was unlike any chick he had ever seen before, an error of nature mutated in vitro. Its congealed, elongated eye stared back at him through a delicate lace of veins.
William shuddered. Crying silently, he replaced the egg in the nest and covered it with straw. There, he thought, you won’t have anything to worry about now. Maybe it’s better this way, after all.
– Dennis Etchison, The Woman in Black
Mr Fatigue
Mannikin
"Extraordinary as it may appear, none of them took any pride in their work: they did not “love” it. They had no conception of that lofty ideal of “work for work’s sake”, which is so popular with the people who do nothing. On the contrary, when the workers arrived in the morning they wished it was breakfast-time. When they resumed work after breakfast they wished it was dinner-time. After dinner they wished it was one o’clock on Saturday.
So they went on, day after day, year after year, wishing their time was over and, without realizing it, really wishing that they were dead."
- from The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
So they went on, day after day, year after year, wishing their time was over and, without realizing it, really wishing that they were dead."
- from The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
cannibal cop
Grimscribe
‘After falling into a pool aged two and experiencing what experts call a non-fatal drowning, S_________ suffered lifelong injuries. “He couldn’t eat, couldn’t talk, couldn’t communicate,” said J________. “He was in pain, had seizures, and his limbs were contorted from the hypoxic brain damage.”’
Knygathin
Grimscribe
I find that rather optimistic actually. If we choose to live in denial, and look away from all the horrifying news and disgusting politics, and refuse to take in the sickly destructiveness of people about us, we can live pretty decent lives.
cannibal cop
Grimscribe
The man who’d died was old, the supervisors said. Heart attack. It could have happened at any time. It didn’t pay to get old. If he’d fallen for this little joke they would have watched him and found any excuse to fire him. The supervisors didn’t want old people working for them anymore
They didn’t understand yet that if you live long enough, everything becomes old and dirty. Dirt gets in the narrowest of cracks and you never can get it all out. Live long enough and everyone you know will sicken and die. Dirt finally has a way of taking us all. After Clayborn’s daughter perished in the fire he should have expected his wife’s death, but he had not. After that shock had worn off, though, he had settled into the inevitability of it all. Dirt would have its way.
Losing a child was like losing yourself. Now every month it seemed he lost someone, an old friend or relative died, and he lost another piece of himself. And nothing surprised him anymore.
– Steve Rasnic Tem, Passing Through
They didn’t understand yet that if you live long enough, everything becomes old and dirty. Dirt gets in the narrowest of cracks and you never can get it all out. Live long enough and everyone you know will sicken and die. Dirt finally has a way of taking us all. After Clayborn’s daughter perished in the fire he should have expected his wife’s death, but he had not. After that shock had worn off, though, he had settled into the inevitability of it all. Dirt would have its way.
Losing a child was like losing yourself. Now every month it seemed he lost someone, an old friend or relative died, and he lost another piece of himself. And nothing surprised him anymore.
– Steve Rasnic Tem, Passing Through
cannibal cop
Grimscribe
Damned art thou if thou dost what thou wilt, damned if thou dost not—this is now, was at the Beginning, and ever shall remain the whole of the Law.
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
cannibal cop
Grimscribe
“Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, and I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans and so have I.”
– Graham Greene, The Third Man
– Graham Greene, The Third Man
Apollonius
Mystic
At times, all the sadness, melancholy, and despair within, as though discontented with their current vessel, in nebulous amounts and gradations disperse into the air I breathe. Even the sky becomes a strange phenomenon manifesting a fatigue of the most abysmal sort. How tragic to be born and to become so insubstantial a person as to be incompatible with both oneself and the universe! How contemptibly effete to neither accept nor revolt against life's vanities!
Apollonius
Mystic
It's a humid day. The sun hasn't appeared. So much seems to have been lost. The days get more precarious. The voices feel louder than usual; they also seem to be multiplying. Everything bleeds with a sense of foreboding, in the Cimmerian chambers of my mind.
cannibal cop
Grimscribe
“I know it’s not easy to accept death,” the doctor was saying. He finished wiping his hands, tossed the towel into his black bag, snapped the bag shut. “We all struggle against it, boy, it’s part and parcel of being alive, this brawl, this meaningless gutterfight with death. In fact, let me tell you, son, it’s all there is to life.” He wagged his finger in punctuation, and ended by pressing the tip of it to Paul’s nose. “That’s the secret, that’s my happy paregoric! Hee hee hee!”
KI, thought Paul. KI and 14. What could it have been? Never know now. One of those things.
“But death begets life, there’s that, my boy, and don’t you ever forget it! Survival and murder are synonyms, son, first flaw of the universe! Hee hee h—oh! Sorry, son! No time for puns! Forget I said it!”
It’s okay, said Paul. Listening to the doctor had at least made him forget the tickle on his lip and it was gone.
“New life burgeons out of rot, new mouths consume old organisms, father dies at orgasm, mother dies at birth, only old Dame Mass with her twin dugs of Stuff and Tickle persists, suffering her long slow split into pure light and pure carbon! Hee hee hee! A tender thought! Don’t you agree, lad?” The doctor gazed off into space, happily contemplating the process.
I tell you what, said Paul. Let’s forget it
Just then, the policeman returned with a big quilted comforter, and he and the doctor spread it gently over Paul’s body, leaving only his face exposed. The people pressed closer to watch.
“Back! Back!” shouted the policeman. “Have you no respect for the dying? Back, I say!”
“Oh, come now,” chided the doctor. “Let them watch if they want to. It hardly matters to this poor fellow, and even if it does, it can’t matter for much longer. And it will help keep the flies off him.”
“Well, doctor, if you think…” His voice faded away. Paul closed his eyes.
As he lay there among the curious, several odd questions plagued Paul’s mind. He knew there was no point to them, but he couldn’t rid himself of them. The book, for example: did he have a book? And if he did, what book, and what had happened to it? And what about the stoplight, that lost increment of what men call history, why had no one brought up the matter of the stoplight? And pure carbon he could understand, but as for light: what could its purity consist of? KI. 14. That impression that it had happened before. Yes, these were mysteries, all right. His head ached from them.
– Robert Coover, A Pedestrian Accident
KI, thought Paul. KI and 14. What could it have been? Never know now. One of those things.
“But death begets life, there’s that, my boy, and don’t you ever forget it! Survival and murder are synonyms, son, first flaw of the universe! Hee hee h—oh! Sorry, son! No time for puns! Forget I said it!”
It’s okay, said Paul. Listening to the doctor had at least made him forget the tickle on his lip and it was gone.
“New life burgeons out of rot, new mouths consume old organisms, father dies at orgasm, mother dies at birth, only old Dame Mass with her twin dugs of Stuff and Tickle persists, suffering her long slow split into pure light and pure carbon! Hee hee hee! A tender thought! Don’t you agree, lad?” The doctor gazed off into space, happily contemplating the process.
I tell you what, said Paul. Let’s forget it
Just then, the policeman returned with a big quilted comforter, and he and the doctor spread it gently over Paul’s body, leaving only his face exposed. The people pressed closer to watch.
“Back! Back!” shouted the policeman. “Have you no respect for the dying? Back, I say!”
“Oh, come now,” chided the doctor. “Let them watch if they want to. It hardly matters to this poor fellow, and even if it does, it can’t matter for much longer. And it will help keep the flies off him.”
“Well, doctor, if you think…” His voice faded away. Paul closed his eyes.
As he lay there among the curious, several odd questions plagued Paul’s mind. He knew there was no point to them, but he couldn’t rid himself of them. The book, for example: did he have a book? And if he did, what book, and what had happened to it? And what about the stoplight, that lost increment of what men call history, why had no one brought up the matter of the stoplight? And pure carbon he could understand, but as for light: what could its purity consist of? KI. 14. That impression that it had happened before. Yes, these were mysteries, all right. His head ached from them.
– Robert Coover, A Pedestrian Accident