Do presently lose all desire for light
A man with a PhD in English holds forth on my hidden neofascism:
Actually, I am a teetotaler, and I always tell the truth, and I have absolutely no inhibitions about telling the truth requiring the seduction of wine to overcome. It will come as a surprise to my adopted daughter that I am a racist, I assure you.
Someone who pretends to know me well enough to discern the secret and yet strangely always discreditable workings of my hidden heart would know those two things about me.
This is the way of evil. Evil lies because no one is attracted to evil when its nature is clear. The lie serves only limited use, and must be extended and expanded in order to maintain credibility. The lie metastasizes, and grows to a point when no sane man can believe it any longer.
They tell lies even beyond the point where anyone is expected to believe or be deceived by them, pointless lies, absurd lies, unintentionally comedic lies. (Note this comment here.)
At that point, a man makes a decision: either he is loyal to sanity, abandons the lie and saves himself; or so great is his loyalty to the lie, he makes himself go mad, hating sanity and sunlight, and he rides the cherished wreck down through the maelstrom into the darkness.
Even such souls as that can be saved. I was sunk lower than this, and so I pity and do not despise. How empty his life must be if he has nothing but these cold and angular self deceptions to clasp to his breast for comfort, false as the smile of a harlot, and nothing but venom for his milk.
For those of you who do not catch the obscure reference above, it is from the pen of Tim Powers:
Like mariners, once healthy and clear-eyed,
Who, when their ship was holed, could not admit
Ruin and the necessity of flight,
But chose instead to ride their cherished wreck
Down into darkness; there not quite to drown,
But ever on continue plying sails
Against the midnight currents of the depths,
Moving from pit to pit to lightless crag
In hopeless search for some ascent to shore;
And who, in their decayed, slow voyaging
Do presently lose all desire for light
And air and living company-from here
Their search is only for the deepest groves,
Those farthest from the nigh-forgotten sun.. .”
(The Anubis Gates)
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
