nor Wind — whence it blows —

nor whither will I know, nor after —

One are Word & Echo.

— The Traveler, inscribed on the cover of The Cypher.

On September 22nd, 2020, just before 10 o’clock in the morning, a corn farmer of advanced age called the local police in Deansboro, New York. He reported that, a short while before, he had heard a loud noise in the woods bordering one of his fields, & going on foot to investigate, had discovered a circle of trees which had been downed (or “blown away,” as he put it) by the sudden & inexplicable appearance of a two-story home in their midst. This house, the farmer insisted, was not a work in progress or some elaborate ruse, but was fully built, trimmed & painted — it even showed signs of age, indicating its construction was not at all recent. After demanding a full & immediate investigation of this disruptive occurrence, he hung up the phone & returned to his crops.

Knowing the old farmer’s eyes to have fooled him before, & having received no corroborating reports of the sounds of falling trees, the police took their time to respond. But after the farmer’s wife phoned the station, a young deputy was dispatched to investigate the noise which may or may not have been heard. On being shown the spot, the deputy discovered that there was indeed a house in the middle of the woods. Its appearance, & that of the trees around it, were exactly as the farmer had described. Asked if he had gone inside, the old man answered in the negative; the front door, which opened onto several acres of new growth timber, seemed to be locked from the inside. Not knowing how to proceed, the deputy radioed his superiors. Before the clock had struck twelve, the circle of seven downed trees was occupied by as many officers of the law.

As the other doors were also locked, & no response was heard to the numerous calls & knocks of the officers, the decision was made to force the front door open. Inside, the police discovered a home almost entirely unadorned. Sparse furnishings, so simple as to be inelegant, provided places to sit or eat in the dining room & the parlor. In the kitchen were found one bowl, one fork, & one cup. Not a single picture or decoration adorned any of the walls on the first floor. Proceeding up the stairs, the investigators found a similar taste at work in the bedroom. Small in size & impeccably made, a bed was the lone object in that room, apart from a set of thick curtains, which were drawn closed. The only relief from the brutality of the décor lay in the study, where a brutality of a different kind awaited the curious officers. First to pass through the door, the deputy was greeted by a sight which nearly made him sick: lying sprawled on the floor of the study beside an overturned chair was the body of a man in his mid-thirties. On the floor near the doorway was a shotgun, its long barrel spotted with blood, along with a multitude of glass shards from a broken mirror which hung on the back of the door. Apart from these odious objects, the room contained only a desk, on whose surface lay a notebook — now known widely as The Cypher.

The Cypher is not written in English (or in any known language of the peoples of the Earth, past or present), but in a strange symbolic system which bears resemblance to all of our languages & to none of them. The presumed author of The Cypher — the deceased man found beside it — has come to be called the Traveler, despite the fact that his spontaneous appearance in the Deansboro woods remains his only established journey. The mystery of this Traveler’s origin & the cause of his death has been a source of endless theorizing not only by the authorities, but by the concerned citizens of Deansboro, by an array of pundits & journalists, & by the countless others who have learned its details through true crime podcasts & the World Wide Web. Since these aficionados have gone to great lengths to make us familiar with the most gruesome aspects of the case, I shall spare the reader such minutiae as the position of the body & the shape in which the blood pooled on the floor — this last being the subject of an immense corpus of social media posts, penned & shared ad nauseam by crazed fanatics. But I will call the reader’s attention to an important fact: the match between the Traveler’s fingerprints & those found on the shotgun, while consistent with an early theory which identified suicide as the cause of death, is not at all consistent with the location of the weapon, or with the truth. That said, I will focus my attention for the remainder of this article upon an exploration of The Cypher, whose pages suggest the thread which unravels the whole knot.

I was first made aware of the alien orthography of The Cypher by a friend of mine, a reporter working at the Utica Observer-Dispatch. The Deansboro police, seeking help from the wider public, had brought it to his employer, that they might scan a number of its pages & circulate them with the Sunday paper. Knowing that my interest in the analysis of symbolic systems was as ardent as it was idle, my friend sent me as many pages as he could attach to an email. I was immediately intrigued. The symbols of The Cypher were unlike any I had seen, & after many hours perusing the scans, I was unable to spot any of the usual patterns suggesting a grammar. At times, it seemed not to communicate ideas discretely, but to be a unified & continuous whole. Though this, like many of my initial theories, was born more of sleeplessness than of genuine insight, I came nonetheless to believe that our only hope of solving the case of the Traveler lay in decoding The Cypher. So, I persisted in devising a scheme by which its strange symbols might be made to speak. I labored for many months, applying ideas syntactic & statistical, numerical & numerological, until at last I broke the code.

Now, dear reader, I feel I must clarify my position before proceeding. For already in forums in the dark corners of the Internet, misrepresentation & slander cleave to my name. My initial publications on the translation of The Cypher have been derided as “fanciful mapmaking,” as “mystical fictions,” & as “shoddy,” but I assure you, they are none of those things. My translation represents, for all it is worth, a true & faithful telling of the Traveler’s tale. I am open to correction where my methodology has led me astray, but as yet, I have seen no alternative system of translation proposed. You are under no obligation to take me seriously, of course, but that you may decide for yourself who is this Traveler, & whence has he come, I will state what I have gleaned from the pages of The Cypher in bare & unequivocal terms:

1. The Traveler, together with The Cypher & the house which contains it, are from another world.
2. The Traveler’s world & our own have one known point of intersection (though there may be countless more), namely the place we call the woods near Deansboro, New York, & the time we call 9:30 A.M. on September 22nd, 2020.
3. The Traveler was killed by himself. Note, I do not say that the Traveler killed himself, but that he was killed by himself, the meaning of which will be made clear below.

All of these findings I have reported to the authorities. But in spite of my insistence & the mountain of evidence I have amassed, the police remain reluctant — even recalcitrant — to accept my conclusions. Regardless of the official narrative, I consider this case to be of the utmost interest to the public, & I am (perhaps sinfully) proud of my efforts in translating The Cypher. Accordingly, I have collected in this article some of its most notable passages, all of which have some bearing on the case. I present these to the reader along with a number of comments, in the hope that this will be sufficient to assuage any remaining doubts about the Traveler & his Cypher.

The Cypher begins without preface or introduction on the 9th of March, 2020. Its text, written by a neat hand with a fine pen, covers just over 197 of its 365 pages. From the first entries of The Cypher, it is apparent that its author (who, as mentioned, is assumed to be the mysterious Traveler) entertained various mystical ideas. These appear to stem not from any definite religious system, but from certain cosmic intuitions, certain impressions of a hidden structure in Nature — they are delivered always with the tone of revelation, given always as truths. Though future scholars of The Cypher may reach a consensus, I am presently unable to determine whether the Traveler came to these ideas through the playful exercise of his remarkable intellect, or whether they were his perceptions — the shimmering chimeras of an omnipresent & total hallucination. In The Cypher’s very first entry, the Traveler presents a short dialogue between a Someone & a Someone Else about the possibility of instantaneous creation. He offers no introduction to the conversation or its interlocutors, but writes as though transcribing events truly witnessed. I translate:

Someone asked, “Which is more likely: that Life on Earth enjoyed billions of years of uninterrupted & continuous evolution, or that Life & Earth blinked simultaneously into existence, flashing forth from the void for precisely one instant — this instant? Is Being a long chain, woven & linked, or the spark of Cosmic wires crossed?”

“Don’t answer that,” Someone Else said.

Whether real or imagined, this dialogue appears to have been the basis for the Traveler’s later expressions of disbelief in the past & future. Even his most central metaphysical ideas (the arguments concerning which could fill volumes) are shrouded in this dubious veracity, making it hard to determine where philosophy ceases & fiction begins — or whether such a division truly existed for the Traveler.

However badly it is needed, the Traveler never seeks in the pages of The Cypher to impose a conceptual order upon his thoughts. Rather, it seems he simply translated to language whatever vague forms they suggested to his mind. Further confusion arises from the fact that he never references another written work by name — the author of The Cypher must far exceed the writers of our own world in creativity, or irreverence, or both. These obfuscations of meaning & origin notwithstanding, there does exist a curious correspondence between the Traveler’s expressions & certain ideas familiar to us. An entry dated Sunday, 24th May recalls the myths of India & the ghost of a German existentialist. It also reflects the further development of his mystical ideation & his growing doubts about the competency of the human mind:

“By far the highest mountain is the mind.”

If some ancient purveyor of wisdom ever gave voice to those words — & history shall furnish one, I am sure — he was no doubt misunderstood. Perhaps he misunderstood himself, for his words speak not to the glory of the intellect, but to its insignificance. It is not that the heights of the mind are high — the mind is scarcely a lump on the skin of the Great Tiger who holds up the World — no, it is that the mind is both the mountain & the climber; the closer comes the climber to the peak, the higher moves the peak into the sky. Though ever do our eyes seek the sun which shines upon the summit, ever is it hidden by the sheer cliffs & dark clouds above. It is true that for some, there are those rare moments of self-overcoming, those moments when it seems the peak is finally reached. But just as it is mounted — just as the first rays of sun dazzle the eyes & warm the skin — the landscape shudders & groans under some great tectonic shift, & a greater peak shoots skyward from the belly of the World. Thus man climbs all his days until at last he collapses breathless — he has got no higher than a hair on the Tiger’s back.

These lamentations, no doubt born of personal experience, afford us an early glimpse of dark clouds taking shape in the Traveler’s mind. As the Twins danced out of our skies & the House of Cancer was established, The Traveler grew more sombre in his reflections. His suspicions of the ultimate impotence of reason seem to have given him over little by little to despair. By the middle of July, a preoccupation with death looms ominous in his thoughts. On the 10th, he writes:

Last night I dreamt of slipping away from my body, of disappearing into the True Nothing that awaits beyond this illusory Being. The Nothing has no form which I can apprehend, of course, nor can apprehension persist beyond its threshold, but what I seemed to feel in that dream was a drifting out of consciousness, a sinking into the open embrace of Death. Only when awakened did I realize how far I had sunk, how dark & empty my mind had become, how peaceful…

As I recall, the state from which I awoke was at once crushing & expansive; its confused & alien character lingered upon my senses in the first flashes of consciousness restored. While Ego was still rousing from slumber, a great voice & a glorious image seized my ears & eyes. The voice, whose words now spot this page, said “slip into the Darkness; slip into the Nothing that Is.” The image which accompanied this call to the Abyss was of clear, undulating water all around, held in by high walls of soothing blue, & of a distant sun above the water’s surface, red & setting in a purple-pink sky. It occurs to me only now that this image bears a strong resemblance to the pool in which I nearly drowned when I was young. My Aunt K — dove in & saved me then, but that was perhaps my longest look into the mouth of the Abyss. I believe now that its interior is fundamentally beyond the reach of the living — for who knows what happened those three days the stone was before the Tomb? — & for that reason I look upon my inevitable Death as a passageway to a new, perhaps greater experience.

In the ensuing weeks, this openness to the inevitability of death intensifies further, & by the 8th of August, it has become a positive longing not to Be:

The cat catches the mouse; who is trapped? The mouse who ran freely across the field must endure a few moments of searing-hot agony, but is then transported to the unimaginable bliss of Nonexistence. But the cat has waited hours for his prey — poised, alert & motionless, his every nerve electric with self-conscious anticipation. After his kill, he may spend the rest of the day in repose, but tomorrow, he must resume his torturous perch once more. Again, I ask: who is trapped?

Entries continue in this morbid, melancholic vein into the fourth week of August, many of them merely echoing the sentiments already expressed. It seems that the Traveler had grown tired of life, but continued to write out of some fleeting notion that in the next moment (which for him, I remind the reader, was always this moment), he would be struck by some transcendent, eternal truth — a truth which would not only justify, but glorify existence & suffering together.

Then, on the 26th of August, the tone of the Traveler shifts abruptly. With this entry begins the erosion of his even temper & the former stability of his affect; his sustained depression gives way to violent oscillations of the emotions. Among those I consulted for my first drafts of this account, there was much dissent as to the cause of these swings in the Traveler’s mood: a psychiatrist thought drugs were responsible; a psychologist, insanity; a theologian named certain Demons whose influence he detected in The Cypher; a poet saw them as a necessary comedic movement, a resurgence out of the tragic depths of the preceding months. It was even suggested by a mathematician with whom I am acquainted that reality may consist of a network of Markovian kernels whose asymptotic interactions produce exactly these kinds of transitions. Though I myself am torn between the poet & the mathematician, I leave the final judgement to the reader & to time. On this Wednesday in August, the Traveler writes:

I have three lines — perhaps circles — of thought to record, each of them a distracted rambling, though not all…

1. On Gardens: A garden is a place where there once was shit, & now…

2. On Olfaction: I observed today that there is a different & distinctly pungent odor to my flatulence preceding diarrhea, as though my sense of smell were attuned to my gastrointestinal — & psychological — distress.

3. On Toilets: I remember there are two in my mother’s house; one quite old & one newer, the newer being much taller. I wonder, why the increase in height? Certainly, no manufacturer approved the increase in material costs. Does the generational change in human height really progress so swiftly? Or could it be that we are no longer young & spry enough to lower our bottoms those few inches further? Perhaps, alternatively, we have come to view the toilet as a place to seek a relief not physical, but psychological — we prefer it accommodate us better in sitting than in shitting. Or maybe we have drifted so far from the memory of defecating upon the Earth that we have simply forgotten how to facilitate our needed release?

In light of these thoughts, I wonder: can it be that any moment exists for the purpose of another? If so, how can we know when we are in the midst of one so pregnant with purpose? Let us not forget that all we have of life is the present moment — in denying any moment purpose, then, do we not deny all?

I caution you not to be deceived, dear reader: though this entry’s corporeal (if impolite) subject matter seems to indicate a turn away from metaphysical speculation & toward the tangible, it truly signals a break with reality from which the Traveler never recovered. Following August 26th, the already-porous mental boundary which may have separated the Traveler’s philosophy from his superstition dissolves completely; the psychedelic theosophy which comes to reign in its wake is as schizophrenic as it is esoteric.

Coherence in the Traveler’s thought is harder to discern after this time, but a particularly lucid passage can be found in his writing on the 6th of September. I present it to the reader as a glimpse of the strange chasm of mind which seems to have swallowed him up:

To speak is a sin, for what can be said that is not already whispered by the perfect majesty of the Cosmos? Our thoughts & words can merely degrade those Divine utterances, whose deep & terrible reverberations we may feel, but never grasp. To write is a still-greater abomination — we defile the corpses of trees to multiply our profanities in ink. And if that were not enough — we wish to be read! We wish that some other should hear our barbarous clangour & join in the dance; we invite them to Damnation, believing our depravity to be Enlightenment. But though they dance with us in circles round the flames, they may yet escape immolation — they know not the Piper’s trick. They have not yet committed the greatest of all sins, which is to understand. For in understanding there is faultless duplication, & worse: the threat of duplication-once-more. Nothing could sink further from the supreme elegance of Heaven. Understanding is even perhaps the sin against the Holy Ghost, for let us not forget, the Holy Ghost completes the Trinity, which is a Unity, while dualities & quaternities are to be found only in the reflections of mirrors, which are abominable.

That this is a confession, dear reader, goes without saying. It is a confession of my sins & yours, for you have sat with me these last few minutes, your eyes turned toward my page & away from Heaven. Perhaps you have even read my words aloud, or heard their echoes in your head. You have done wrong, it is true, & you will continue to do wrong; for only in Death are we free from the wicked perversions of the Mind. But do not fear for your Soul; all will be forgiven you. It is I alone who am damned, for I have tempted you. I sink deeper into Hell with every letter I scratch on this accursed page. But you, dear reader, are saved — for I can guarantee that you will never understand.

It is hard to imagine the tortures the Traveler must have experienced while constructing such a passage. In it, we see that his former hope of a supreme revelation has vanished, & he is left with this: suffering in Hell which is not imminent, but really present. And what a present it must have been, for the Traveler’s unbelief in the past & future would have made each torment an eternity unto itself, an interminable cruelty without even the consolation of happy memories. Thus far, it would seem, The Cypher supports the ready assumption that suicide was the cause of the Traveler’s demise. It would appear to many impossible that life could long continue in such afflicted despondency.

Fortunately, subsequent entries in The Cypher tell us that his damnation was not in fact eternal; some, written in the language of poetry, even suggest that he ascended from this dark nadir to the highest peaks of spiritual ecstasy. Under the date of 13th September, for instance, he writes:

Before the Stars —

every little child.

The Baby would smile.

Not enough is given here to grasp his meaning, but from other entries I have gathered that the Traveler thought it remarkable that a baby should smile, given the fate it is born to suffer (though how much knowledge of Destiny he believed a baby to have is unclear). In general, it seems the Traveler’s practice in the face of the sublime was to adopt a kind of laconic quietism, his words serving not as explanations, but as touchstones to greater contemplation. On September 17th, we find another expression of this attitude, albeit one markedly different in tone. Here, the Traveler records but a single line: “Go where you are called.”

At this juncture, I remind the reader that we are nearing the start of the Traveler’s extraordinary journey into our world, & the end of his life. Much about these events remains unclear — due in no small part to the Traveler’s unwillingness or inability to distinguish matter from metaphor — but if his preoccupations in his final days are any indication, the shuttle which transported him to our world is by nature geometric. He appears to have spent all of September 19th meditating on the nature of shape. On this day, The Cypher depicts a series of twelve diagrams, or rather, twelve variants of the same diagram repeated. In each one, a straight line of some length & angle is drawn, & beneath all of them is the same description: “This is a circle.” On the 21st, he gives what may be a related treatise on circles:

Hell may have its rings, but Heaven is truly one circle, a Halo on the head of God. For on a circle, there is no beginning & no end; each point is as close to the center as all other points, as perfect as all other points. On a circle, every movement away is a movement towards; there is no journey which has not a return. With a second circle comes the Fall, the destruction of the Unitary perfection (& what was Creation but this?), for between two circles there are already infinite possibilities for intersections. Yet with only two, there are still also infinite possibilities of finding the true center, of glimpsing the shining Empyrean light. But introduce a third circle, a fourth, an infinity… all hope is lost. The Paradisal point is not found: it is always obscured, pulled out of focus by the wild attraction of false centers so numerous as to erase the notion of a center altogether. And this is the World — nay, the Worlds — this whirling about infinite centers of infinite circles, at every point intersecting infinitely more.

Whatever transdimensional wheels have begun to turn in the Traveler’s mind seem to have driven him to ever greater abstractions, while these abstractions seem to have become for him ever more real. As his last hours tick to a close, he expresses complete disbelief in the mind’s most basic intuition — that of the Self — & beneath this crumbling foundation, he places total faith in an all-ensnaring web of dreams & mirages. On the morning of the 22nd, he writes these final words:

We look for the Self & it vanishes; where has it gone? It was a dream. I am a dream of Myself. Myself is himself a dream, a dream of Me. The many eyes of the many I’s look out from the ever-shifting center of the Web — a Web spun of Someone Else’s dreams, always growing, always changing. It is horrible to think that I am Someone Else’s dream, even if Someone Else is Me, or even Myself. For while Someone Else is asleep, I can never truly Be. If I could only lie still, & catch Myself sleeping, I could cut the thread, I could break this interminable chain…

And now, dear reader, it is eminently clear what became of The Traveler. Exhausted, tired of the “whirling about infinite centers,” he set up like the long-entrapped cat of his writings & awaited the next intersection of the infinite circles, the spinning together of threads in the web. It soon arrived, cloaked in the mirror-like image of a dream. But this image, the Traveler knew, was no more a dream than himself. He took up the shotgun, making sure of its payload, & walked through the tangled knots of the web to his study at 9:30 A.M. — he had found the place, the time & the means. Walking in & closing the door behind him he raised the gun, looking down the barrel at his own reflection. His reflection looked back at him with a gentle & knowing smile; neither of them had any doubt that the mirror worked both ways. The Traveler placed his finger on the trigger, breathed out slowly, & shattered the glass.

Having established beyond reasonable doubt the cause of the Traveler’s death, it remains for us to explain how his body, along with the entirety of his dwelling, made its way into the woods near Deansboro. I would of course like nothing more than to answer the voice of our scientific age, which cries out for an explanation — in the form of a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics, or else a particular knot tied in a primordial shoestring — but I must admit that on this account, I fare no better than the mad heretics who suggest the existence of the soul. I have in my mind & in my notebooks the beginnings of a theory, but I do not wish to make any claims which The Cypher will not uphold. Leaving the specifics to the great minds in physics, then, I will merely restate what The Cypher suggests: that the world is not made of matter, but of dreams; that we do not live, fundamentally, in a spacetime continuum, but in an infinite network of possible experiences, of which but few take forms comprehensible to the human understanding. By his radical destructive act — his rejection of the dream — the Traveler may have caused a tremor in the region of this network which was home to his world. Perhaps the reverberations of this disturbance sent a part of that world crashing like a great wave into our own — is it impossible to believe that, if only for a moment, the innumerable points of intersection in the vastness of the network could have included a dead man in his house & a ring of trees beside a cornfield? I believe it was so, dear reader, & it may be that in some inevitable intersection to come, the truth of The Cypher will be shown to you, as it was shown to me.

in December 2018, i was taking a shower & thinking — as i’m sure many do — about Plato’s allegory of the cave & our unending search for Truth. after some bending & warping of the original metaphors, i had in my mind an inverted image of the allegory: one in which the truth was hidden in the dark recesses of some cave infinitely deep & foreboding, its twists & turns mapped cautiously by the light of feeble torches. i imagined a cave with a billion dead ends, concealing treacherous chasms & deadly monsters, & at the bottom — Truth? Salvation? Death? — i wasn’t quite sure. nonetheless, i thought it sounded like a great idea for a story; it had all the mythical & philosophical qualities of a great (read: grandiose) novel, if only i could work out the details.

under the assumptions a) that i could conjure up the specifics in the process of writing, b) that my enthusiasm for the story would never diminish, & c) that i would find the time necessary to complete it, i set out in January 2019 to write the story as a 12-part serial novel. calling it The Leviathan (again, grandiose), i intended to post one part online each month until it was finished. simple, but, as it turned out, not very easy. the writing began with an outline, which i reproduce here from my notes:

1. Ernest on Emerson (planet), receives call to go to new world
2. Ernest warned of danger, told not to go
3. Ernest convinced to go, recruits others
4. Ernest is betrayed by friend, forced to leave Emerson
5. Rebecca (spouse of Ernest) is pregnant
6. arrival on new world; attack of Leviathan
7. discovery of inhabitants; ship was lost to caves
8. Ernest slays Leviathan; Jacob (son of Rebecca) born on new world
9. Ernest & others grow food, must hunt young Leviathans to survive
10. Jacob matures; Ernest is killed by Leviathan
11. Jacob faces Leviathan to retrieve ship
12. Jacob is killed; others return to Emerson

the reader will note the Abrahamic qualities of Ernest’s arc, the use of Biblical & literary names, the likeness of Jacob to a Sci-Fi Jesus; Rebecca was no doubt meant to play a version of Mary adapted for interplanetary space. it was all quite cleverly arranged. somewhere between parts 7 & 11, the inverted allegory of the cave would have been brought to light (drawn-out & overwrought, in all likelihood). but though the themes of the story are clear enough, i’m not entirely sure what the central message would have been. that uncertainty, in fact, is the sole reason it pains me to pronounce the project dead— there are questions, i feel, that must be answered about our yearning for Truth: what do we ultimately mean by Truth? is it really somewhere to be found? what will we become if we find it, or if we never do? i hoped this story might help me explore the dark passages leading to the heart of those questions. but all things considered, The Leviathan was an ill-constituted vehicle for such adventures.

from the beginning, my decision to set the story on an exoplanet more than 39 light years from Earth created a number of issues. most obviously, i had to dance around all of the advances in science & technology required to extend human life beyond our little rock beside the Sun. i had to be vague enough to avoid the mechanics of such innovations, yet concrete enough to avoid invoking Science as a kind of future-magic. in most cases, the results were boring descriptive passages of the sizes, shapes, & functions of novel objects (spaceships & the like). where i had wanted to write about human beings & the search for Truth in social & individual contexts, i felt obligated to first bring the structure of my fictional world into focus — this ate time, it ate words, & it ate my desire to continue with the tale.

additional problems stemmed from the serial publication of the novel’s parts. given the format, the smart thing (which i did not do) would have been to write many or all of the parts before publishing the first one, to lay the foundation of the story in advance. publication would then entail editing (always extensive) & the addition or removal of such details as were crucial to the meaning & plot of the narrative. instead, i tried to write, edit, & publish one part each month. this constrained not only my time & the quality of my writing — it also constrained the evolution of the story by decisions previously made. it meant that the story had to take shape linearly, as though its beginning, middle & end already existed in proper order, just waiting to be written. this was untrue, of course, but i plowed ahead for 5 parts before i realized fully its implications.

after publishing part 5, already two months behind, i lost all motivation to continue. by that point, it had become clear that, while the story remained true to the letter of the outline i had sketched, its Spirit had departed completely. the dozens of pages i had amassed were odious to me — writing more would only be a twist of the knife in my stillborn creation. i came to detest The Leviathan, & in its shadow all my writing was disdainful to me. it’s really only now, more than a year removed, that i’ve returned to writing with any frequency, any joy; though its fruits under my care be small, i am glad they are sweet once more. i’ve decided to stick to short stories & personal accounts for the foreseeable future, hoping to avoid another labyrinth of uninspired words. presently, i cling fast to that saying of Borges:

it is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.

The original text of this article, as well as audio & video versions, are available at https://perceptua.blue/literature/brave-new-world/

Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s famous & extremely prescient story of a dystopian future in which every aspect of life is controlled by an all-powerful state. It’s essential reading for informed thinkers, & it’s less than 200 pages, so go & read it if you haven’t already. You can find it here.

The true genius of the book, what really sets Huxley apart, is an intuition for the psychology of social control. As opposed to the rulers of some other fictional dystopias, the agents of Huxley’s World State do not maintain control through violence and outright oppression. Instead, they begin to mold obedient citizens from a very young age — before they are even conceived, in fact. Children are pre-sorted into social classes, forbidden to have any private thoughts or close personal relationships, and essentially hypnotized into conformity. The government provides plenty of vacuous entertainment to occupy all of their spare time. Bright lights, pleasant smells, and sensuous experiences are designed to keep everyone complacent, & all with one aim in mind — stability. It is through stability that the state maintains its grip on its citizens.

Huxley realizes that terror is not conducive to stability, & accordingly his Brave New World is controlled not by fear, but by dopamine. Hedonism & the love of the material world are not suppressed, but actively encouraged. Huxley sees insightfully that this method, as opposed to rule by heavy-handed force, is far more conducive to the highest aim of authoritarian regimes, namely uneventful, unending, uninterrupted control. What do those in charge have to fear when all are lulled by ease & pleasure into complacency, or better yet — love of their own servitude? In his 1946 or ’47 foreword to Brave New World, Huxley writes that, for this “love of servitude,” at least four things are needed: an “improved technique of suggestion,” a “developed science of human differences,” a “substitute for alcohol & other narcotics,” & “a foolproof system of eugenics.”

As an “improved technique of suggestion,” the book suggests hypnopaedia, a method of indoctrinating young children while they sleep. They are instructed by way of pre-recorded propaganda to place the community above all else. They should consider themselves & their very thoughts to be the common property of everyone, & they should keep nothing from their peers. As things stand, we’ve not gone as far as Huxley’s novella in this regard, but there are some unsettling parallels to be observed. With the advertiser-driven models of social media & other websites, we are subject to the incessant & ever more intrusive noise of brands pushing their products & services. For now, we are still safe from subliminal messages in our sleep. But if our dreams are not interrupted by popup ads, or “you can skip this video in 5… 4…,” or some other annoyance, that is only because advertisers have not yet figured out how to do it. You can be sure it is not a deeply held respect for your privacy or sanity which has thus far kept them out. If we wish to stay clear of hypnopaedic Hell in the future, we would do well to keep it in mind, & to push back strongly against anything that looks remotely like it.

In regards to another of Huxley’s requirements for a dystopian future, a “substitute for alcohol & other narcotics,” our forward-thinking & not-at-all shallow culture has some promising candidates. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — we’re already addicted. In much the same way that people seek an escape from pain or social isolation through the use of drugs, they disappear into the vacuous world of social media, where they can broadcast a false version of their lives & soak up whatever twisted view of the world is best suited to their ideological — & sometimes pathological — cravings. Social media are often touted as a way to connect with “anyone, anywhere, anytime,” & they certainly have value as a means to facilitating deeper, in-person experiences. But it’s often more sensible to assess the purpose of a product by observing how it is used — & creating meaningful, lasting relationships is not how social media are typically used. Can you recall a time when you closed Twitter with a smile, feeling deeply enriched by the bits of 280-character wisdom you just imbibed? Or is Twitter, like the others, more often a mindless distraction? Or worse, are social media something you look to for validation, checking how many people liked your post, or who watched your latest story? I’ve certainly fallen prey to this dynamic. In Brave New World, many of the characters take soma, a drug that lets them “take a little vacation” & escape even the most mild discomfort without any risk of lasting harm. In many ways, the apps on our phones act similarly — there is no obvious Instagram hangover, no visible psychological or physical damage from habitual tweeting. & yet on some level, we all know the damage is being done.

What’s more, I think social media render us ineffectual as people. Particularly, when we see or take part in social media activism, we might get the impression that something is being done, we might be broadcasting that we are part of the solution. Quite often, however, we are merely amplifying digital noise around problems that will only really be solved when we put down our phones & solve them. But ask yourself, who does it serve, if it serves anyone, for us to be escaping real problems (& by extension, their solutions) through social media? The danger, if we draw on Huxley’s line of thinking, is that it serves whoever seeks to control us. You can fill in that blank with whatever horrible monster you like.

In addition to the current panoply of digital drugs, another technology looms worryingly on the horizon — VR (virtual reality). One can only imagine how the escapism we just examined through the lens of social media will intensify when VR becomes sufficiently “real” to be believable, & when its applications grow beyond their current scope. As to the other questions surrounding VR, like “How will it change our perception of what is real?” & “How will it alter aesthetic experiences like watching movies?” I really can’t say how impactful VR will be, but these are things worth thinking about. Given our track record with new technology & the bells of warning tolling out from the pages of Brave New World, I think we ought to remain wary that VR is not too easily hijacked by state or commercial interests & turned into a machine for the delivery of propaganda.

The two remaining ingredients in Huxley’s recipe for a Brave New World, as outlined in his foreword, are a “developed science of human differences” & ”a foolproof system of eugenics.” In the book, children are not conceived or born naturally, but are manufactured in test tubes in facilities of the state. They are presorted by a scientific procedure into classes which determine their jobs & social positions. Obviously, we have not yet progressed to this level of technological creationism, but it is not inconceivable that things are moving in that direction. With genomic sequencing, in vitro fertilization & a number of other innovations, the possibility comes closer each day. What remains to be seen is whether this technology will be used properly for the reduction of risk to the child & its mother, or whether it will be commandeered for ill by those who wish to put a heavy finger on the scale of social organization. Brave New World warns us about the potential consequences of the latter. The citizens of the World State cede all control over their reproductive faculties to scientists & social engineers. Even more disturbing is the attitude the citizens adopt regarding parenthood. “Mother” & “father” become 4-letter words, & the very thought of our “primitive” form of reproduction is an offense to them, something backwards & repulsive. It seems clear, however, that the calculated manipulation of the social order for the sake of stability is far, far worse.

Given that advances in biotechnology are likely to continue, it may be prudent to take preemptive action against any eugenic applications of new technologies. On today’s political landscape, there are many worrisome views which validate this concern. Considering right wing identitarians, the obvious concern is a rigid hierarchy enforced by the technology & by institutions: a hierarchy organized with white men at the apex & all others relegated to an unjust subservience. Regarding left wing authoritarians, who despise unequal distributions not just of wealth, but of competence, the fear is that the technology may be used to shave the diversity & richness of human talents down to a flat, grey, but equal blob.

On that dark note, I should mention that Brave New World is more than just a warning against complacency in the face of totalitarianism. Huxley uses the all-encompassing power of his World State as a plot device, a sort of backdrop against which the most important themes of the story are explored. It is against this backdrop that the protagonist, John, struggles to find meaning. John was born largely by accident; his mother, Linda, was a citizen of the World State who got pregnant while on vacation near a Savage Reservation (Huxley’s politically incorrect name for a fenced reserve for the natives of Malpais). When she gave birth to John, Linda’s shame at being a mother prevented her from returning to the World State. She opted instead to remain on the reservation, & it was there that John was raised. Linda taught John to read from the two books which she had brought with her: one a scientific manual & the other, the works of Shakespeare. John was an outcast among his peers & looked down upon, but he found solace in the noble & poetic sentiments of the Bard & his characters. In many ways, Shakespeare served as John’s moral & aesthetic education. (Notably, the title of Huxley’s novella is derived from Miranda’s speech in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Act V, Scene I: “O brave new world, that has such people in’t.”). When a chance visit from one of the story’s other characters gives John a chance to leave the reservation & go to London, he can scarcely be more excited to see what this “brave new world” has to offer.

John’s sojourn to the World City of London creates an intense juxtaposition between the shallow hedonism of the high-tech “utopia” & the dogmatic, superstitious culture in which he was raised. Initially excited by the prospect of a state organized by rational principles, he becomes quickly disillusioned. John is caught, in Huxley’s words, “between insanity on the one hand & lunacy on the other.” He wishes ardently to live a life aligned with the virtue & loftiness of his Shakespearean heroes, but finds no place where these values are expressed. Everywhere he goes, he is exposed to their opposites. John is revolted by the World State practice of “death conditioning,” which involves exposing children to the bodies of the recently deceased in hospitals with the aim of reducing the fear & significance they attach to death. What’s more, his love interest in the novella proves not to be the chaste & virtuous woman he dreams her to be. When she makes advances toward him with the free & casual sexual attitude her culture has imparted, John attacks her & retreats from society altogether. He returns to the religious penitence of the culture in which he was raised, whipping himself for his sins & desires. I won’t reveal any more of the details of John’s story to those of you who have not yet read Brave New World, but it is a sorrowful one, to say the least.

The tragedy of John’s life, as it unfolds in Huxley’s dystopian future, carries a powerful lesson. It shows, as Huxley has it, “that the purpose of life [is] not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification & refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.” In a moving scene of dialogue near the end of the novella, John insists that, for the attainment of this purpose (which Huxley terms man’s Final End), conflict & suffering are required. The kind of meaningless, self-absorbed, & pleasurable experiences offered in the World State lead to empty, wasted lives. They may serve to create social order & stability — the bread & butter of totalitarians — but they are antithetical to man’s Final End, to the pursuit of a fully-engaged, meaningful life. In closing, Brave New World leaves us a chart through the rough waters of authoritarianism & runaway “progress”, & offers us a shining beacon, calling us to seek a higher purpose in our lives.

Last weekend [June 15th, 2019], I was relating to a friend how I have many times been unimpressed by an album on first listening, & how, on hearing it again some time later, I have been chagrined to find I had missed out on its power, its “finer qualities”. I attributed this missed chance at sonic happiness to a lack of attention devoted to the work in question. Perhaps this was true in some cases, but today, while listening to Voxtrot’s Raised By Wolves EP, it struck me that perhaps it was not attention, or not only attention, that was missing when it first made its way to my ears some 4 or 5 years ago. Today, I was intrigued —in fact, I was compelled — by the levity of the music, its brightness set against the lofty, “serious” themes of the lyrics (tragic love, among other subjects). It wasn’t as though I had to make any effort to notice this playful exchange; it reached out & grabbed me.

I am now of the opinion that it is not careful consideration of the qualities of a work of art which inspires our attraction to it, but rather some deep affinity which lies below the level of conscious thought, some connection we feel to the spirit of the art, which takes hold of us & transforms our experience. It goes without saying that this connection is experienced individually — each of us finds something or nothing of ourselves in the numerous forms of creative expression. Moreover, my own case seems to show that the same individual, through the passage of time & the accumulation of experience, may come to feel quite differently about the same work of art. In any case, there seems to be something in all genuine art which has the capacity to take us from the realm of the personal & historical into that of the universal & eternal. This is a tenuous theory, but perhaps it is not far from the truth: we like what we like because we are presently the sort of beings who like such things.

I placed the last of the dishes on the drying rack, rung the water from the sponge, and turned off the sink. Moving aside, I searched with my hands for the small towel hanging from the drawer. It was found in its usual place, and my fingers were dried by the familiar routine; no direction was needed from my eyes. My eyes took no direction themselves, wandering aimlessly over the white stucco pattern on the wall before me. The greater part of my focus was trained on what I was hearing. On the counter, a safe distance from the inevitable splash of washing too many dishes in a too-little sink, the spirited voice of a lecturer leaped from the speakers of my phone.

“Carl Jung had an extraordinary ability,” the lecturer was saying, “of allowing his imagination to run wild.” I picked up my phone and continued to listen as I walked from the kitchen into the living room, turning the lights off as I went. “What he would do is daydream. He had figures of imagination that came to him, and he could speak to them. He regarded them as the central source from which all his inspiration emerged. When he spoke to them, he was exploring a question: what happened when he switched off consciousness? Jung described his experience as ‘a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.’”

I was in a state of intrigued curiosity as I locked the door of my apartment and headed down the hall to the bedroom. I set my phone down on the nightstand and continued into the bathroom. As I ran the water to wash my face and ready my toothbrush, I could still hear the Professor in the other room.

“I once knew a woman who had a vivid, recurring dream. It always took place on a beach. On the side of the beach was a man with a snake, a big python. There was a crowd around him, and she didn’t want anything to do with it. She was afraid to go up there because she was afraid the crowd would push her toward the snake.”

When I had finished preparing to go to sleep, I sat on my bed and listened until the lecture concluded. When the audio stopped, the room emptied of noise entirely. It was the kind of silence which lends to reflection, and as I switched off the last light and lay down to sleep, I turned over the contents of the lecture in my head. “A voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world,” I thought. “What might that look like?”

In the usual course of falling asleep, images often spring to mind. Sometimes, their relevance is obvious, often they are the recollections of the day. At other times, they are only tenuously familiar. They have a habit, too, of transforming before they can be safely related to some thought or event of one’s past. On this night, I thought of the dream described in the lecture. My body lay in my bed, but I was on a beach. The vast blues of ocean and sky stretched away to my left, meeting at a distant horizon broken only by the tall dunes of sand to my right. I imagined it was the beach from the dream described in the lecture. Soon, however, the image took on a new quality. The beach was no longer that of someone else’s dream, but of my own experience. It was one I had walked on before.

As the image became more clear, I realized I was walking beside a close friend. We had just been talking, too — of that, I was sure. The air had all the exciting tension of a small space between big ideas in an engaging conversation. As the space was evidently left for me to fill, I took a breath and prepared to speak, though I knew not what I would say.

“You always ask the right questions,” came the words, as if from nowhere. “I enjoy talking to you, it’s stimulating in a way that most conversation isn’t.” My friend and I continued to walk along the wet sand where the tide had just gone out. “Even if you can’t find the words to say what you are trying to say, you give me a lot to think about — ”

I stopped, turning around to face my friend. I was perplexed and somewhat agitated by my own words. What I had heard myself saying sounded highly arrogant, as if all the value of my friend was to be found only in his ability to arouse my intellect. “Why are you saying that?” I asked myself.

Suddenly, something changed. I became aware of another presence on the beach. I looked to my right and saw standing beside my friend… me. Or at least, a person who was very nearly the image of me. I noticed in his eyes, however, that something strangely ominous was lurking. I knew it was he who had been speaking to my friend. It was as though I had split off from him, from another part of myself, when I had questioned him. As I lay in my half-waking state, taking in this dark fragment of my character, a tingling fear began to creep over my body. I did not know why I should be afraid of myself, only that I was.

“Why are you saying that?” I repeated with trepidation, only half-wanting the answer. The figure, whose only apparent difference from me was the living blackness in his eyes, then turned his gaze upon me, his lip curling into a malicious grin. The encroaching fear, which had crawled its way into all of my limbs, was lit on fire. I felt on my skin the prodding of ten thousand electric needles, and my vision of sea and sky was thrown into a spiraling chaos. I was conscious of being awake and even more so of being afraid, but still I did not open my eyes. Something urged me to go on.

When the image became stable once more, the scene was quite different. I stood in the vestibule of an empty church. It was the very one I had attended during my youth. The carpet was the same dull brown that it had been when I came to mass each Sunday; light filtered through the stained glass windows as it had always done. It struck me that I could not recall ever having been there alone.

Something told me I was there for a reason. I was there to find Father — . I walked from the vestibule into the church. It was uninhabited but for three figures: the icon of the Crucifix, a statue of the Madonna and Child, and another of Christ with his arm outstretched, light emanating from his heart. Walking toward them between the long, empty rows of pews gave an eerie feeling which slowed my brisk walk to a timid creeping. I had nearly reached the altar when out from the sacristy walked the part of myself I had seen on the beach. He wore the same garment which had clothed him then, only now it had been transformed into a flowing, priestly garment. He walked slowly, with arms and eyes uplifted, as though he had come to administer a holy sacrament. From his right hand hung a ring of golden keys, the long and heavy “skeleton keys” I can remember finding at my great-grandmother’s house as a child. I wondered, and at the same time feared to know, in what locks those keys might turn.

The portentous being who shared my form moved with a grace beneath his unholy garb which gave the impression of levitation. He stopped when he arrived at the altar, his eyes fixed somewhere in the distance. I was emboldened once more to find out his intentions. “What are you hiding?!” I nearly yelled at him.

Slowly, he turned his burning gaze downward to meet mine. When the black of his eyes fell upon me, my vision again became unstable. In a blinding flash, I saw a long hallway lined with prison cells, from the depths of which came the languished cries of the imprisoned. Every surface was bright with all-consuming flames. He had caused this fiery hallucination, I was certain, for I could hear his dark and mocking laughter as my vision burned. I glanced furtively into the cells, but I could not tell who or what were his prisoners. In that moment, I knew the locks on the cell doors would only be opened by the keys I had seen in his hand.

The vision ended as quickly as it had come. Whether by his pity or a fit of my own resistance, the fire vanished and I was again standing before him in the church. What I had seen terrified me beyond words. Fearing yet worse from his gaze, I ran to escape through the side door of the church.

In a state of exasperation and fear, I emerged in the sunlit parking lot of the church. It was a warm afternoon, and I was surprised to see the lot full of parishioners. Many of them were headed toward their cars, as though mass had only just let out. The appearance of these people being no more unsettling than anything which had yet befallen me, I went on looking for the head of the departing congregation. I soon found the priest talking with a group of older parishioners. Their conversation seemed to conclude as I approached, for they walked on in the direction of the parked vehicles while he stayed behind. As I walked toward him, he wore a welcoming, almost expectant look.

“Father, may I speak to you?” I asked.

“Of course, of course,” he replied.

It happened as before that I did not know what I would say, but I was certain that I would speak. What left my lips was quite unexpected: a lengthy and meandering dissertation on my notion of what God might be, if he were anything at all. I did not know why I had chosen the subject, or that I had chosen it, but I listened carefully to the words as I spoke and watched the expression of the old priest closely. What I said had some semblance of sophistication, though many of the ideas I presented were a mere regurgitation of others’ thoughts on similar matters. I went on for several minutes longer, building a church in nouns and adjectives as grand as the one in brick and mortar beside us.

When I finally concluded, the priest smiled benevolently at my earnestness. He took a breath and began to reply in an even, thoughtful tone. As he was speaking, the notion found its way into my head that he had not sufficiently appreciated the grandeur of what I had told him. Before he had made half a reply, I cut him off.

“Yes, but Father,” I interjected, “if we think of God as…” the words again poured from my mouth. The priest was startled at first, but waited good-naturedly for me to finish, and then ventured to speak once more.

Soon after he began, however, it seemed that he still had not heard what I wanted him to hear. I interrupted him yet again, and began speaking in the same imperious tone. It was evident by the look on his face that my impudence was testing his patience, but though it wore thin, and each word were another thread pulled, he charitably let me speak.

At the next intermission in my pontificating, the priest let out a short sigh and attempted a third time to convey his thoughts to me. He had spoken hardly a word when yet again my lungs were filled with air, and my mouth with interruptions. This time, however, my head also was filled with a voice. “Why are you doing that?” it angrily wanted to know. “Let him speak!”

Just as had happened on the beach, I at once became aware of a third party to our ill-faring conversation. I looked over to find once again the other part of me, dressed in the same manner and with the same horrible grin stretching across his face… my face! I was filled with fear and shame as I realized that this hellish creature was a part of me I could not escape.

I turned to look at the priest, who had thus far borne my verbose disrespect. “Father, I am afraid,” I said, exasperated. “I think there is darkness inside me.”

He looked at me gravely and said, “There is darkness inside us all, my child, but God is within us too. Can you see God inside of you?”

My vision flashed as it had done inside the church. I saw once again the place choked by fire. Among the flames, a statue lay fallen on its side: the same statue of Christ, his hand stretched toward me, which had adorned the wall of the church. The fire was bright and scorching, and I could see the image of the Savior only partially, briefly — I was overwhelmed with desperation. “I don’t know if I can see him, Father,” I stammered.

“This darkness inside of you, what does it want?” The priest asked.

I looked again at the figure standing beside me. Everything I saw was still scorched by the flames, but he stood in their midst as though he belonged. His sinister glare at last revealed to me what he was after — he wanted power. He wanted undisputed rule over body and soul, and he would persecute, suppress, and lock away anything which challenged his authority. “It wants control,” I answered the priest.

He paused for some time. “And what do you want?”

The conventional “right” answer, the “moral” answer was obvious. But measured against the menacing glare of the dark being beside me, I knew convention would be powerless — he would smell the lie. Only by the truth could I escape whatever unspeakable fate he had planned for us. Yet the deeper I looked for an answer, the less certain I became. I knew that this thing, this part of me was full of darkness and malevolence, but I saw also what tremendous power he possessed. I saw in his eyes and his wicked grin an intelligence that was wide awake to all it could do. Whom had he locked away in his fiery dungeon? I shuttered to think that they, too, were parts of myself held prisoner by this demon of mine. As long as he held the keys which unlocked those cells, could anything be done to stop him? I had managed so far to stand in his way, to force him to show himself, but throughout my ordeal, he had been the part of me which could speak. He was my voice, my intellect incarnate. I feared that he was me — that without him, I could not speak at all. How, then, could I fight him? And did I want to?

These questions were asked, but left unanswered. It was here that my vision ended, or rather, my voyage returned to its place of origin. It had begun and ended with a man and a snake. The great and terrifying discovery was that both man and snake were me. Never before and not since have I had such an experience; I was awake, and yet it seemed to unfold like a dream without any direction on my part. On many nights since my encounter with the darkness within, I have laid awake wondering if I could go back again, if I could learn something more. Yet always I pull away when my mind starts to wander. Nietzsche said that the strength of a man’s spirit “can be measured by how much ‘truth’ he can tolerate.” I agree emphatically. If there was any “truth” in what I saw that night, it looked far more like a dark and hungry abyss.

Image: http://mythologian.net/ouroboros-symbol-of-infinity/

Certainty is impossibility. You face the insurmountable in unwinding the dense tangles of your fate with nature untamed, and on beginning you find uncertainty is not only woven in the knots; it is the string itself. It surrounds you, and underlies even those things which are most familiar and routine. You are not an island in the flood; you are inundated. The water pulls apart any shifting mound of dirt you long stand on and drags you again into the current. The last bill is paid, and your car promptly breaks down. Make a new friend, and another will as surely be estranged. Eat well, sleep and make healthy your body, and all the while the darkest parts of your mind lie in wait of the worst moment to convince you it is worthless to try. Over and again you are pulled into uncertainty’s rush. And in you must go; go with hardened acceptance lest you cry out, and your gasp of alarm pull the water in. Flooded lungs are swift to seize and muscles, however strong, will fail in little time.

How then, to float? How to keep your head level and take the air with steady breath? And why?! Why resist when you might surrender and be swept away? “There’s no point,” after all. “Life has no intrinsic meaning.” Okay. Perhaps not. But you are reading, after all. Your mind is telling you that pixels are letters and letters are words and words stand for something greater. That has meaning to you. It may appear as dilapidated driftwood plunging downriver beside you — but driftwood floats. Wrap your arms around it and breathe. Worry not that it is driftwood, that it is old and waterlogged; that is all the better. It has been long in the water, and the water in it. It will not easily go under. It is not certainty nor solid ground to stand on, but then, there is no land in sight. There is no theory, no argument, no ideology which will lift you out of the deluge. Nothing will tell you in digestible syllables exactly how you ought to live. Beware anything that does, for that is the final rock in the river before the falls. Should you slip and fall from that last tempting refuge, the plunge to the abyss awaits.

Rely instead on that within you which keeps you floating, on that which stops you thrashing your arms until you are swallowed and drowned. It may not be meaning in any objective sense; perhaps there is finally no higher purpose in the cosmos beyond the sky. But what of the cosmos behind your eyes? It is there that your world is shaped into being. Pay attention to what you see: there is as much meaning for you and I as for a tree, and a tree stands tall. More, it is beaten by the wind and the snow and the rain and it grows! And see the birds! They fly, for God’s sake. Even you, when you entered the world a baby, knew already how to smile. In spite of your absurd and tragic fate, you smiled. What have you lost in growing up? Recall now your sense of humor and live in the understanding that — though certainty will ever evade you — you are the world in yourself. That you are alive is meaning enough.

the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time

Without diverging too far from our stated path, I believe it relevant to add that culture is a structure which emerges from the collection of all the interactions between individuals in a given social arrangement. Some interactions and some individuals have far greater impact on culture than others.

In the real world, the depth and longevity of one’s impact on culture is hard to define, and depends on many variables. For the sake of demonstration, however, let us assume that everyone’s impact on culture is determined solely by two factors:

1. The sum of all the social interactions they are party to. To keep it simple, let’s imagine everyone in our sample has the same amount of interactions, and that they interact randomly.
2. The relative position of their personality on a totally made-up scale I’ll call the Normalcy Curve (NC).

Imagine the NC as a Gaussian distribution like the one above with individuals of personality Type A at the far left, those who are Type Vanilla in the middle, and those Type B at the far right. Each step toward any Type along the curve signifies an increase in that Type’s characteristics.

Now, suppose that a sample society is structured exactly as shown above. What would the culture be like, and what would be considered weird? As you can see, most people are grouped near the mean value ( μ) of the NC. This not only means that there are more Vanillas, it also means that these Vanilla normies will interact with other normies far more frequently than they will with those at the extremes of Type A or Type B. Precisely the opposite is true for A’s and B’s. A majority of their interactions will be with Vanillas rather than their own Types.

Due to the infrequent interactions and numerical insignificance of A’s and B’s, Vanillas will have a heavy impact on the “customary beliefs [and] social forms” of our sample society. They will wield immense power in constructing important social distinctions like “weird” and “deviant”. If the social forms of A’s and/or B’s differs significantly from Vanillas, they may be labeled as freaks or outliers*, and relegated to the margins of society.

Obviously, this is an enormous oversimplification based on precisely 0 data, and though we may not have a sailboat, I believe the central conclusion holds water. Based on our initial assumptions, Vanillas will dominate the cultural landscape through sheer numbers. As a result, what is “weird” in this society will not necessarily be immoral or unworthy of pursuit, but will instead be an artifact of the distribution of personality types along the Normalcy Curve. This reflects with some accuracy the world we experience in that those who enjoy or do atypical things are often labeled weird or strange, even apart from any moral judgments.

In conclusion, my definition of weird is:

a trait ascribed to individuals who exhibit cultural practices which differ from those of the average person.

Groundbreaking stuff.

• * Pun intended.

Sidebar: Here is a link where you can find the general formula for calculating the frequency of interactions between individuals (or of anything else, for that matter). Input arbitrary numbers at your own risk.

If I managed to distract you from what you’re supposed to be doing for this long, please smash the Clap button repeatedly and share!

Thanks,

Avery

The wind blew cold and strong. It bit his ears. The frost bit his lips. It had eaten his fingers days ago, and his toes before that. His jaw was shut tight, and the width of a hair was all that separated his eyelids. He felt even closer to death. His mind and his muscles were focused and strained. His eyes had to stay open. He had to keep moving forward. Right leg? Left leg? It didn’t matter — he could not feel either. There was only forward.

The afternoon sun hung dim behind grey clouds. It offered no warmth. He had been so long in the cold belly of the cold, Alaskan beast that he had lost even his memories of warmth. He did not remember what it was like to lie on a beach at midday in June, or to stand under a hot shower, or to press his hand against a scalding stove. He did not remember, and he did not care to remember because without warmth, there was no cold. If there was cold, death would follow; that much was certain. But there would be no death because there was no cold. There was only forward.

Ahead, the snow lay deep and undisturbed. Each of his steps fell heavy on its surface and marred its glossy appearance. He trudged slowly through a forest of snow-laden pines. The trees came forward to meet his approach and fell away behind as he passed. Some distance off, the conifers thinned and yielded a view of a towering mountain, its icy crags stretching toward the sky. He was determined to reach that mass of ice and rock before the sun reached the horizon. The distance didn’t much matter, the hour even less. The next tree drew near and passed by. The mountain grew closer.

He was pushed on, compelled by an incessant, unyielding voice in the back of his head. Over and over it repeated. Forward. Forward. It was not the word he was hearing; the voice did not speak, exactly. It was more like a feeling he had but could not name. It was not determination — determination had died on his first night alone in the forest. Hope, too, was silently killed when he first heard the wolves crying in the distance. Fear had at last succumbed when he had been two days and two nights stalked by the hungry pack. On the previous night, he had felt desperation, but as he lay the last of his dry supplies on a small fire and watched the twofold glowing eyes circle nearer, even desperation gave in; it was dragged off into the dark along with his backpack. Yet the voice had not gone quiet. The feeling did not subside. Instead, it raged and swelled inside his chest. It grabbed a burning stick from the fire and swung violently, striking the nearest beast on the mouth. It whirled and slashed and drove the howling dogs back into the dark forest. The feeling kept him alert and alive and finally revealed its nature to him. The feeling was hatred.

Hatred whispered in his ear and drove him onward. It bared his teeth against the elements and did not let him falter. It was his shepherd and his salvation. Yet he did not call his feeling hatred, for they were in perfect communion. He and hatred were one and the same, and any name for it but “I” would be a waste of his labored breath, a needless heave of his burning lungs. He could not afford to make distinctions nor to think. If he ceased to hate, he would cease to be.

Forward. He heard it again, and forward he went. He did not question, but only hated — the snow, the wolves, the empty gas tank of the sled he had driven too far from the trail— he hated all of it. He hated the mountain, too. It was an ugly, jagged rock which stuck up from the Earth like some divine accident. It was fortunate, however, that God had not bothered to erase this particular mistake, for each year a small group of climbers gathered near its base and attempted in pairs to reach its isolated summit. So long as the cold was piercing, the ice would give the climbers’ picks a firm hold. The wind picked up and blew a harsh reminder against his face. It was cold enough now. He was counting on it.

He had almost reached the mountain, and had gotten ahead of the sun. The trees were sparse, and his path had become an arduous climb up a long, steep hill. From the top, he would be able to look upon the western face of the mountain, beneath which lay the camp where he would find huddled and shivering any climbers who had braved the winter’s cold. His legs burned and his breath was short. Another hour passed before the hill began to level off. He was nearing the top. The sun had dipped below the distant clouds and was shining brilliantly in its last hour above the horizon. Taking a few more steps, he lifted his face and could finally see over the opposite side of the hill. The evening light washed over the Earth below and gave the tall drifts of snow a deep, orange radiance. It illuminated the bare downward slope which led to the base camp. There, he could make out a tightly clustered circle of stones which could be nothing other than a fireplace. Beside the ring was a single, snow-dusted tent. The wind pulled the nylon ropes of the transitory dwelling taut against its deep-driven stakes and blew its snow cover into jumping, billowing waves. He nearly jumped himself. His hatred screamed a bitter, spiteful victory within him as he began to run down the hill toward the waving tent. Had the muscles of his face not been frozen into a painful, snarling grimace, he may have smiled. He may even have laughed, though the sound would have seemed strangely sinister to anyone who knew of his reprieve. He was not happy, for hatred was still his master, but his hatred was now bursting with life. You could not kill me. It roared inside him as he galloped down the hill. Your cold, your silent cruelty, your vicious dogs — they are not enough. You are not enough. I am greater. I survive because I will it so. I decide. I am the judge; I am Justice.

He reached the bottom of the hill and stumbled with exhaustion into the camp just as night was falling. It was far too cold now to find anyone outside. As he approached the tent, he slowed to a purposeful walk. Hatred continued to bask in its triumph; it coursed through his body with every beat of his excited heart. Just outside the tent, he paused and drew in a deep breath. He was ready to reclaim his body from the wild. He would open the door and be once more among men. He would be brought back to life.

Dropping to his knees, he cleared away the snow which had piled in front of the zipper. With his frost-bitten fingers, he took hold of the small piece of silver metal holding shut the door to his old life and pulled. The cold metal teeth of the zipper came easily apart and the tent began to open like the wide, smiling jaws of a nylon beast. He could not wait to be swallowed. He guided the zipper up the side of the door and watched the loosened flap swing in. His heart sank.

There was no one inside. There was nothing at all in the tent. The stomach of the nylon beast was empty. Whatever group of mountain explorers had pitched the tent had left it and gone. He could not understand why, but it did not matter. They were not there. No one would bring him back to life. He remained for some time on his knees before the open door, staring blankly inside. He watched as the wind blew freshly fallen snow into the tent, where it swirled gently and hung suspended in the air. When the snow began to settle on the floor of the tent, he crawled quietly inside. He turned around to look out through the door and could see that the bright winter moon was now well above the trees. It shone across the landscape and cast long, crisp shadows over the smooth surface of the snow. He reached up and grabbed the zipper which had unsealed the empty tent. As he pulled it slowly back down, the cold metal teeth closed first over the black night sky, then over the radiant, cratered surface of the moon, then over the tops of the tall pines. At last, the jaws were shut tight and all was dark. He lay down on the floor. He was no longer surprised nor angry. All that had pushed him on had become as cold as the wind and as quiet as the falling snow. He had ceased to hate. He lay with his eyes shut in peaceful repose and thought of nothing. In the distance, he heard the cry of the wolves.

What is discipline? I am told it is something cold, something we wake to in the mornings with gritted teeth and begrudgingly greet though we long to remain asleep. Discipline is called cruel; I have heard it must be learned by the whip with mechanical repetition, and recalled as often by the scars which resist our stretching awake.

Now and again, I am accused of having discipline — even of being disciplined. Yet when I part with sleep each day, I do not grudge the sun a moment. I rise to find my teeth are not worn flat from gnashing; they are strong and sharp. The mirror shows no scars across my back; I see only skin pulled taut over muscle and bone. If I am disciplined, my life bears no mark of it.

How, then, am I to receive this name? Should I not be insulted when I am called cold, called cruel? But perhaps I am only misunderstood.

I do not sit before my desk for fear of punishment. I do not write these words from reflex. None of the greater endeavors of my life have I begun from any dread or aversion. Where the way is laid and adherence commanded, I do not walk. I have known no motivation but desire.

Desire is no friend of reluctance. It waits not for the morning, but fills even my sleep with fiery dreams. Desire stands atop mountains still dripping with night and screams anticipation at the slumbering sun. It thrashes its chest to welcome the dawn; it is the drum which calls the beat of my heart. It fills my lungs with the early air that I may breathe and be renewed. It lifts the lids of my eyes that I may see as many new beginnings as glistening drops of dew. Everything I crave it asks of the world; everything I am it offers in return. It is vigor and control. It burns as bright as a star. Desire is the light which dispels the darkness of cold and infinite space. To look on its brilliance for even a moment is enough to make one’s head spin. So be it. The room is spinning, the Earth is spinning, the Sun is spinning, even the Milky Way is drawn into a spiral around the all-devouring black beast at its center. The whirling will not shake me. Rather I will be as a cosmic potter — I will kick the wheel faster and set my hands to shaping the very universe. I will not fret when supernovas splatter my brow, nor turn aside when stardust strikes my eyes. I will go on with my work though my muscles ache and my brow gleams with sweat and celestial clay. I am pushed onward by desire, the fount which springs all creation.

I leave in this labor of mine no room for lethargic acquiescence. There is no time for dragging my feet. Every day is a choice, a commitment, an affirmation of life. If those who do not share in my determined wakefulness must call it by a colder name, I will not stop to argue the point. I will say only this: “I hear your words, but feel not your icy breath. I possess nothing of the tame and languid quality you ascribe to me. Desire is my only discipline.”

Alasdair Duncan sat in his study, his glasses on the middle of his nose and his nose in the middle of a heavy manuscript. It was the third one he’d read that week, and the long hours of labor had made the critic weary. His forehead, like the brown leather of his armchair, was wrinkled both from age and from strain. He did not believe in ‘light reading.’

“One must remember,” Alasdair often said with characteristic haughtiness, “that one sits down not with a book, but with its author himself. When a man has given us in ink a view onto his very soul, our respect and attention is the least we can return.”

Recalling this phrase of his now, Alasdair paused, removed his glasses, and rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes. “Respect and attention,” he thought. “Yes, that would all be quite easy if these excessively romantic hacks could write plainly for a paragraph, let alone a bloody novel.”

Alasdair glanced at the clock on the wall. “Thirteen minutes after ten,” he said aloud. Letting out a deep sigh, he raised his glasses and the manuscript to his eyes and set about reading once more. Despite his will to remain focused, he read only another page before he caught himself gazing absently through the window, his mind wandering.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he exclaimed, throwing the manuscript down on the table beside him and again rubbing his eyes. He stood up quickly and walked to the window which had distracted him, pausing to clear his mind. Outside, those traces of light which staved off the dark had gone, and Night wrapped his arms greedily round the landscape. Night, with his cold, bony fingers slithered between the trees and curled them into his clutch. He clung to the branches as a dying man clings to breath; his willful resistance to the impending light lending fervor to his grip.

“How can I be expected to review an author who can’t write?” Alasdair thought contemptuously as he gazed into the dark. He had evidently forgotten his previous admonition of respect. He sighed again, and walked back across the room. Standing over the table, he glared down at the overturned manuscript.

“As if anyone would read this rubbish anyway,” he said, taking the downcast papers in hand. He turned them over and leafed brusquely through the pages for some length of time before his aggravation rose anew — this time more violently than last. Alasdair suddenly turned, and taking a step forward he flung the hated manuscript into the fire which warmed his study. It landed with a thud atop the burning logs and sent a rush of sparks spiraling up the chimney.

Night looked hungrily through Alasdair’s window. The flames of the fire — the only light in the large room — flickered and grew dim beneath the burden of the discarded pages. For a moment, it seemed Night crept inside, a silent intruder lurking in the corner, crawling slowly up the walls. Alasdair shuddered and drew his chair closer to the fireplace. He stirred its contents, and soon the flames sprang renewed from beneath the manuscript. Their orange tongues lapped at the edges of the upturned cover and glowed with a warmth that sent Night reluctantly back to his domain.

Though Alasdair sat watching the fire for some time, he took only meager pleasure in watching the manuscript burn; he was no sadist. His attitude, in fact, was quite flippant. No great treasure had been lost to the flames, he felt, and no great emotion was incumbent on him. He sat passively and watched the edges of the cover change in a minute as the leaves had done in a month — first green, then brown, then black. How like life and the passage of days it was he thought not. His work had made his eyes tired and his mind blank, and it was not long before the crackling of the fire had lulled him to sleep in his chair.

“Mr. Duncan?” A voice rang in Alasdair’s ear. He was being shaken from sleep by a hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Duncan?” The voice sounded again, startling Alasdair into a wakeful, if somewhat frightened state.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” Alasdair inquired hastily as he stood up to look round at his visitor.

“I apologize for disturbing you at so late an hour,” answered the voice which had roused the sleeping critic. “My name is Edmund Nochtus.”

Alasdair’s unexpected guest was a tall man with an easy and confident air. His robust features were shaped and apportioned as if by a sculptor of some classical era, and about this artful frame he had draped a traveler’s cloak, the fabric of which matched his jet black hair.

“And what reason have you, Mr. Nochtus, to call on me at so late an hour?” Alasdair questioned the man curtly. “Who let you in here?”

“The porter heard me knock and showed me the way. I make my apologies again, sir, but I had only this evening to spend in town, and my arrival here was most unfortunately delayed. I ask only a few moments of your time, for I know what precious little you have.”

Alasdair felt unsettled. He gazed intently at the man, seeking a motive for such an untimely visit in his piercing, intelligent eyes. As he considered whether to treat this man as a guest or as an intruder, the clock began to chime. Alasdair glared at the vociferous oval on the wall; in the light of the still-burning fire, he saw that it read twelve. “Surely my time is not all you seek, Mr. Nochtus,” he said crossly over the clock’s announcement of the hour. “What is so pressing that you've come at the stroke of midnight?”

“You see the worst in me, Mr. Duncan,” Nochtus returned with an amiable smile. “You are quite right, however. I’ve come seeking information relating to my work and yours. To speak plainly, I must know what you think of my book.”

Alasdair’s searching look turned suddenly cold. The clock sang a twelfth time and was silent. “Your book?” Alasdair asked slowly and with audible anger, “You've come uninvited to my home in the middle of the night to ask me what I think of your book?” His voice rose as he spoke. “I might tell you firstly what I think of you, sir!”

“Now Mr. Duncan,” replied Nochtus, unfazed by Alasdair’s ire, “I know you must be tired from lack of sleep and from answering a question you undoubtedly hear often, but as I’ve explained, I have come at the only time which circumstance permits. This journey I made not to anger you, but simply to hear your opinion, which I hold in the highest regard. I ask you to please sit down with me, sir, and lend me for a time your respect and attention.”

Alasdair was taken aback. His brow furrowed with curiosity. “Respect and attention…” he recalled his phrase for the second time that evening. “Do I know this man? Edmund Nochtus…”

“My words are familiar to you,” Nochtus continued, as if replying to Alasdair’s thoughts, “but my face is not. I have not had the honor of meeting you before tonight, Mr. Duncan, but your reputation precedes you. Your critical eye, as well as your phraseology, is widely known.”

This compliment paid to Alasdair softened his countenance even as it left his guest’s lips. The wrinkles of his face left his brow and reappeared by his eyes, his frown of perplexed annoyance becoming a cheerful smile.

“I won’t excuse your waking me up just yet,” said Alasdair, attempting with some effort to maintain a grave and scolding tone “but I cannot turn away one who appreciates the great care I take in my work. Please, come and have a seat by the fire and we’ll discuss your book.”

Alasdair motioned to a chair beside his own which faced the fire. Nochtus gave a slight bow and took a step toward the appointed seat. Alasdair, noticing that he still wore the attire of a traveler, asked “May I take your cloak for you?”

“No, thank you. I won’t keep you long.” Nochtus smiled again and sat down, sweeping up in his arm the black fabric of the cloak and allowing it to hang over the edge of the chair.

“As you wish,” replied Alasdair, turning to leave the room. “I’ll fetch your book and some tea.”

He returned a few moments later carrying only a wooden tray, on which rested two cups of hot tea and a porcelain dish of sugar. “I confess, Mr Nochtus,” said Alasdair sheepishly, setting the tray on the table beside his chair, “I’ve been reading so bloody much lately that I’ve had no time to organize everything under review. Could you remind me of the title of your book? I’m certain I’ve set it aside somewhere.”

Leaning forward, the guest took a cup of tea from the tray. Alasdair noticed that he did not so much as consider the sugar. Nochtus looked up, meeting Alasdair’s gaze. He blew over the tea and drank slowly. “It is called The Traveler’s Question” he said.

Alasdair froze. He could not tell whether it was a trick of his eyes, or perhaps the light, but as he stared past Nochtus at the fireplace and the smoldering remnants of the manuscript, he swore he could just make out the last of the words on the cover. The Traveler’s Question.

The critic flashed a nervous smile at his guest and walked uneasily over to the fireplace, taking the poker in his hand. Extending the implement into the fire and stirring the coals with the ashes, he managed to respond, “Yes, of course. The Traveler’s Question.” He made his best attempt at a calm nonchalance as he turned over the manuscript with the poker and continued, “Let me go and find your book.”

Returning the poker to the rack beside the fire, he turned to go from the room, but had only advanced one pace when Nochtus said, “There’s no need to go searching, Mr. Duncan. It’s right here.”

Alasdair’s eyes grew wide, fearing his guest had discovered what had become of the object of his journey. He wheeled round to look at Edmund Nochtus, and saw to his great relief that he was smiling and pointing with his forefinger to the side of his head.

“You mean to tell me you’ve memorized it?” Alasdair asked with nervous excitement, struggling to match Nochtus’ smile.

“More or less,” the seated man responded, “but I wish only to discuss the foundation of the work. Surely it could not have been so painful a read that you’ve forgotten even it’s theme.”

“No, no. Of course not,” Alasdair said, his eyes wandering again to the fireplace, “but why don’t you begin by telling me what inspired you to transcribe those grand ideas of yours?”

“Certainly,” said Nochtus deliberately. As his guest returned his tea cup to the wooden tray and sat back in his chair, Alasdair felt measurably relieved. He was assured by Nochtus’ calm expression that his transgression would not so easily come to light. Nochtus looked pensively in the direction of the clock, his eyes shining with the beginnings of a rapturous affection. He paused only a moment before continuing.

“It is said that all written works are autobiographical in some way or another, and in that respect mine is no different. You may have guessed by my attire that I am myself a traveler, and as I’m sure you remember, the book attends a wanderer’s search for purpose amidst the wisdom of the great philosophers. I have understandably taken license to improve certain aspects of real experience, but for many years this vagabond’s journey has been my own. The traveler has walked the Silk Road and communed with Avicenna; He has sat with Zeno of Citium beside the Mediterranean; He has heard from Confucius the Way of the Superior Man. He begins by reading volumes, and soon comes to comb the shelves of the grandest libraries known to history, seeking a lantern to light his way. He studies now ethics, now metaphysics, now astronomy, now faith. At the estranged ends of the Earth, he finds a most curious thing, this oarsman of divergent rivers, this disconsolate delver of the depths. Do you know what he finds, Mr. Duncan?”

“Tell me in your words, sir,” said Alasdair with a soft smile.

“He finds that, at bottom, all doctrines are the same. The mystics, the empiricists, the rationalists; the Stoics and the Epicureans; they all speak one language: that of subservience. No matter from where these thinkers begin, they end always in something higher. They appeal to Virtue, or to Reason, or to Justice, or to God. For a time, the traveler appreciates these philosophers and their pursuit of a grand Truth, but eventually he grows tired of their brushing humanity aside. He comes to see their deference to a higher authority as a shrug of their shoulders, a laying down of their burden, a willful turning away from Nature as she is. ‘They misunderstand themselves,’ he says. ‘The great power of philosophy lies not in the discovery of value, but in its very creation.’ Our wandering friend turns around to see the ages behind him and the sages beneath him, and at last he understands: meaning is a choice.”

Nochtus paused, smiling triumphantly at his host. Alasdair shifted his weight in the armchair and considered briefly what he had said. He then asked, “Meaning is a choice?”

“Yes,” Nochtus began again, “and one we all must make. We choose each day what the whole of our lives is worth. I understand this, and I am free. I see by my own eyes, I stand on my own legs — I find all things in myself.”

“Surely not all things, Mr. Nochtus,” said Alasdair with a grin. He motioned to the dark beyond the window before inquiring, “Do you mean to tell me that it is up to you whether the day shall dawn on me in a few hours’ time?”

“Nature will do as she wills, I make no claim over her. I cannot choose the course of events, but only how I understand — ”

“I won’t argue it’s a weighty idea you have,” interjected the critic, “but as you have asked for my thoughts, I feel I must tell you that you place far too much confidence in human ability.”

Nochtus laughed in good humor and his eyes shone brightly. “But Mr. Duncan,” he said, “you place just such confidence in yourself.”

“What do you mean?” asked Alasdair with an expression which hinted at indignation.

“Why, it is perhaps you more than anyone who has learned to choose what is valuable and what is not. Only consider your profession. You are perpetually engaged in deliberating which new authors are worth the people’s time. You decide several times in a week, I’m sure, who succeeds and who is ruined.”

“You flatter me, sir,” Alasdair replied, “but I simply give my honest opinion of what I read. The people must elect for themselves how to spend their time.”

“Certainly, but you must admit that to your opinion you attach a certain significance. By words such as ‘reasonable’, ‘informed,’ or even ‘true,’ you signal to yourself and all who read your reviews that your ‘honest opinion’ carries a judgment of value. Take your library, for instance.”

Nochtus rose as he finished speaking and walked behind the armchairs to the shelves stacked from floor to high ceiling with Alasdair’s books. The critic’s eyes narrowed as they followed his guest, and he began to feel as annoyed as he had when he was first woken from sleep. “What of my library?” He asked shortly.

“Some of your books,” answered Nochtus, passing his hand along a row with his back to his host, “you keep here by your side. Perhaps you have several editions,” he continued, tilting forward a pair of books with the same title, “and maybe even one signed by the author.” He scanned with his eyes the cover of a book which bore a handwritten inscription. He seemed for a moment to be deep in thought. Closing the book and replacing it on the shelf, Nochtus turned to look at Alasdair. His smile was gone. Drawing in a breath, he went on, “But some books you do not keep, Mr. Duncan. When you judge that a book is of no value to you, it does not find its way amongst your shelves, does it?”

Alasdair was unnerved by the question. Something in his guest’s tone made his stomach sink. He stared dumbly back at Nochtus and did not respond.

“No,” Nochtus persisted, “when you misunderstand an author, when you deem him incomprehensible, you do not show him the ‘respect and attention’ you claim he deserves, sir.” All traces of friendliness had now gone from the traveler’s face, and were replaced by an expression of contempt. “Instead, you become angry and careless, and you throw his labor of years into your fireplace!”

Nochtus’ voice had risen to a yell, and he concluded with his arm raised and his eyes glaring at Alasdair Duncan. His finger pointed in accusation toward the flames which were all that remained of his book.

“I — I — ” Alasdair began, but found himself unable to respond to the traveler’s indictment. Visibly agitated, and realizing he’d been discovered, he began to back away toward the wall opposite Nochtus. The latter, seeing the fear he had evoked in the critic, advanced toward him with a malevolent grin.

“Had you bothered to read my book through,” said Nochtus as he closed the distance between himself and the accused, “you’d know that at its conclusion there is still one question the traveler must answer. He must yet decide what is to be done when his values — the values he has sworn to as his reason for living — are spat upon by those who have not the courage to grasp them.”

Nochtus stopped. There was little space left between he and the critic, and still less between the critic and his desk against the wall. Alasdair trembled, and Edmund Nochtus began to laugh.

Suddenly, he turned and grabbed the poker from beside the fireplace. He whirled around, swinging it hard and striking Alasdair in the chest. Reeling backward, the critic’s foot caught the edge of the carpet. He fell precipitously toward the desk behind him, striking the leg with such force that it swept easily aside. The wood reported its irreparable pain with a loud and extended crack. No longer supported, the corner of the desk collapsed toward the floor, and the clutter of the day’s correspondence eagerly followed the fast-increasing gradient. Inside, the contents of the desk could be heard leaping from rest and meeting quickly the tops of the drawers which had formerly concealed them, but now began to spill open. From the corner highest in the air, a heavy ceramic inkwell took flight of the mangled desk and traced a high arc, landing with a dull thud upon the carpet. As it poured out its contents onto the fine embroidery, it rolled along on its side. The inkwell would have added a thick, dark circle to the hand-stitched pattern had it not been stopped short in its path.

Stepping forward, Edmund Nochtus intercepted the inkwell and raised it from the floor. His ferocious, animal gaze he fixed upon his stunned foe, who had just then placed his feet properly beneath his body. Alasdair had scarcely risen to half his height when Nochtus, drawing back his arm, threw the inkwell with a terrible violence against his upturned face. He fell once again to the ground, showing this time no sign that he would rise.

Nochtus stood silently over the body of the critic. His hand was colored vividly with the evidence of his deed, but not so brightly as the tortured face of his victim. It glistened in sinister relief in the lamplight — a study in crimson and black of a high-speed meeting of ceramic and skin.

A moment passed before Nochtus bent down amidst the disarray of his design and gathered from the floor a single piece of paper and a quill, both stained with blood and ink. He dipped the quill in the pooling mixture, and walked calmly back to the armchair he had sat in previously. Pulling the table closer and setting the paper on the wood, he looked across the room at the lifeless critic. He sighed and gave a slight smile, and then set the quill to the paper. The Traveler’s Answer, he scrawled across the top. Below this title, he wrote:

I suppose I must thank the dear, deceased Mr. Duncan. His insolence has inspired the resolution to a question I once asked myself, but knew not how to answer. I have wandered for many years, but tonight I am lost no more. I do not seek to understand, nor to be understood. My instinct has awakened, my will is hungry and sharp. It is the wild, the unbridled, the raging within us all that I have here embraced. I know now that I must always be this way — the way my nature would have me: carefree, mocking, violent*. I feel I am myself at last. I am become Night.

Satisfied at last, Edmund Nochtus folded his note once, placed it on the table, and walked resolutely from Alasdair’s home. He stepped outside, pulling his cloak about him, and was welcomed back into the open and waiting arms of darkness.

*I paraphrase Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra: “Carefree, mocking, violent — this is how wisdom wants us: she is a woman, all she ever loves is a warrior.”

Image Credit: Beth Trissel, http://bethtrissel.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/inkwell-on-old-parchment.jpg