How Did We Live?

My God what are we? What have we become?

How did we live? How did we think? Were those thoughts? Could we even call them thoughts?

What did we do with philosophy? With the philosophy we inherited? With the whole history of ideas that was passed down to us?

What did we do, with all the books we read? With all the books about books that we’ve read? With all the introductory guides to the books about books that we’ve read?


How we’ve failed ourselves. How we’ve failed everything. How we’ve failed philosophy – and the great philosophers, who burn above us, in their firmament. Who burn in their constellations above us, in the philosophical sky.

We didn’t do anything good with our lives. We didn’t do anything right. And now here we are, in our Wrongness. We who should never have been here. We who were brought here as a joke. (A joke played on what. On who?)

And we can’t even laugh at ourselves properly. Our laughter isn’t loud. We don’t laugh from our chest. From our guts. Our laughter doesn’t reach all the way down. Our laughter doesn’t encompass everything. Our laughter isn’t a laughter at everything, and ourselves included.


And now we’re deep beneath the world. Now we’re deep under all things. The world should crush us. And we should feel crushed. And we should feel destroyed. We should feel done for.

We haven’t risen to disgust. Our disgust isn’t complete. We haven’t reached it, disgust. We haven’t gone all the way.

Even now, even underground … Even buried down here … Even interred down here … It’s not complete, it’s not finished, our disgust. We haven’t died to ourselves, as we should have. We haven’t risen anew from our completed disgust. In our finished despair.


The horror doesn’t roll through us. The horror at the poison. The horror isn’t thunder inside us. We haven’t sunk to the very bottom.

There’s still room in our despair. We can still stretch our limbs, walk about, in our despair. Our despair’s still capacious. Still big enough. We can still breathe in our despair, and we shouldn’t be able to breathe. We should still be feeling suffocated by our despair. We should be gasping.

And the lies. The lies aren’t intolerable enough to us, not yet. The lies don’t disgust us enough. We still speak. We shouldn’t be able to speak. With these words. With all the words.

Because all the words are foul. Because all the words are contaminated. And we should just sit in silence forever. We should just die. Not even die – just perish. Just … wink out.


And not even the grandeur of a death. Not even the dignity of a death. We shouldn’t be able to die. Death’s too good for us. Death’s something we can’t attain. We can’t rise to its level or sink to its level, death.

We should just … decay … just rot to vileness. Just bubble in foulness. Just froth, bubbling and frothing. Like the froth from the mouth of a rabid dog.