Time will dry its eyes
Day by day, in every way, we are getting better and better. Vital fictions for vital persons. They shoot horses, don’t they? But as for shooting ourselves—ask Gloria Beatty, ask Michelstaedter, ask Mainländer, ask Weininger, ask Hemingway. But do not ask Jean Améry, who made his exit with a drug overdose. He survived Auschwitz, but he did not survive his survival. No one does. With our progenitors and the world behind us, we will never hold this life and its horror to be MALIGNANTLY USELESS.
Almost nobody declares that an ancestral curse contaminates us in utero and pollutes our existence. Doctors do not weep in the delivery room, or not often. They do not lower their heads and say, “The stopwatch has started.” The infant may cry, if things went right. But time will dry its eyes; time will take care of it. Time will take care of everything that is and everything to come. Then all will be as it was before we took our place in this place. Human life: it does mean something, but not so that it might as well mean nothing. So be it.
There will come a day for each of us —and then for all of us— when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking, as it has done from the very beginning. It will go on and on until it stops. And the horror will go on, as day follows day and generations fall into the future like so many bodies into open graves. The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others while the clock is still ticking. Could it be possible that we all deserve to die, and to die out? But our heads are not obsessed by such questions. To ask them is not in our interest.
Almost nobody declares that an ancestral curse contaminates us in utero and pollutes our existence. Doctors do not weep in the delivery room, or not often. They do not lower their heads and say, “The stopwatch has started.” The infant may cry, if things went right. But time will dry its eyes; time will take care of it. Time will take care of everything that is and everything to come. Then all will be as it was before we took our place in this place. Human life: it does mean something, but not so that it might as well mean nothing. So be it.
There will come a day for each of us —and then for all of us— when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking, as it has done from the very beginning. It will go on and on until it stops. And the horror will go on, as day follows day and generations fall into the future like so many bodies into open graves. The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others while the clock is still ticking. Could it be possible that we all deserve to die, and to die out? But our heads are not obsessed by such questions. To ask them is not in our interest.
-Thomas Ligotti