The Exterminating Angel

I can leave this room if I want to. I know it. I can will myself out of any situation. I can leave this room, if only in my thoughts. I can live other lives, see distant places, fall in love, bear children, die and be reborn. It is as simple as staring at the wall. But a sense of desperation overcomes me. Why would I want to live only in my thoughts? Why would I dream, when I could touch, taste, smell, and hear? There is a world outside the Great Hall. Its movements are perfected, even when they fall into disorder and tragedy. The cycles of destruction and rebirth, withdrawal and return, life for death and absence for material; more beautiful than the most fluid motions of a ballerina. More meaningful than the deepest prose. Why should I only be allowed to imagine, or worse, observe and never participate? I long to shake the answers to these questions out of every still body around me. The world is waiting for me to know it. But it is not waiting, it is passing. Passing me, passing all of these jellyfish that call themselves men who voluntarily sacrifice the best hours of each day to "earning their way".

People are growing fat with their contentment. Their minds are being dulled by work. But all of this is necessary, no? People must make things. Value must be determined, worth must be assigned, progress must be pushed on, even blindly, for what else are we put here for? Time. Time is the exterminating angel. With it comes the concept of limits. Moments are sacrificed to the God Future. Planning is valued more than enjoying. Inertia, above all, tramples thought into dust. And what has become of this angel, Thought, which certainly is no exterminator? Thought is also currency. God Currency and Angel Action hand in hand reeking their own special revelation in the hearts of us fools. Let them eat my own heart as a sacrifice, that they may never be satiated.

What wicked thoughts go through my mind. I am more alone than the man in the moon, who is only a pathetic human imagining. Sometimes, in the darkness of the Great Hall, I see myself crouched on the moon in utter isolation, eyeing the entire Earth in one glimpse. And what do I see? Wasted opportunity. Idiots competing for money, falling in love with sacrificial lambs, killing the things they love, devoting their lives to the endless construction of altars to Gods they neither created nor comprehend. But these thoughts are running away with me, they are becoming too disorganized. But did I not just say that disorder was beautiful?

Enough of this. Today I will work myself to the bone, to the point of sheer exhaustion. "God goes with thoughtless people" and that is from a genius. I will work until all of these horrible meaningless imaginings become lost to one goal: sleep. But first, lunch, and for that I will go to the gardens.