Ruination

No one would see it as ruined but us.


The ruins. Do we even know what ruins are? Weren’t we brought up in the ruins? Haven’t we known nothing but ruins?


Ah, but we have a sense of who these ruins would be ruins for, that’s the thing. We keep a memory of those before us. More intelligent than us. More learned than we are. More wide-read.

We know how they’d see it, those thinkers we admire. Wouldn’t they see this as loss, as disaster?

We are their conscience, in some sense. They continue in us, even in our stupidity. Their thoughts echo in ours – in our stupidity. Their ideas sing even now in our idiocy.

And of what do they sing? Of ruination, of course. Destruction, of course. The end of the end of the end, of course.

Terrible that we should be the only ones who remember the traditions. Tragic that the memory of those thought-traditions should have fallen to us. Aberrant that we should be their legatees; that we should continue their thoughts.

Europe! We carry Europe forward in the new world! We are the memory of old Europe, of old European thought. It’s fallen to us, the undeserving. It’s been given to us, the unwarranted.

Europe! The last of Europe! The final effort of old Europe! What Europe flung ahead of itself: us!

De-volution is a thing. Dysgenics are a thing. General stuntedness. The great Diminishment. The uber Stunting.

But what makes us stand out is that we know the stuntedness. That we know the dimunition. That we are aware of the dysgenics that produced us, the likes of us.

Which is why we know the ruins as ruins. Which is why we know ourselves to be ruiners, part of the great ruination. As stranglers, even if we don’t want to be. As destroyers, even if we don’t want to be. As murderers, even if we don’t want to be.

It’s all we know how to do: destroy. Even if we think that it’s the opposite of destruction. It’s all we know how to do: murder. Even if we think we do the opposite of murder.

Even our European philosophy reverence is a form of ruination. Even our text-worship. Our throwback existentialism. Our philosophical relic hunting.


It’s fallen to us, European thought. We are the inheritors, we who cannot grasp what has passed down to us.

We introducers and contextualisers. We writers of secondary commentary. We underlings and underdogs. We fuck ups. We wrong-in-the-heads. We second-raters. Third raters. We duh-brains and dullards. We remedials. We fuckwits.


In permanent religious crisis. In permanent philosophical crisis. What we take to be religion. What we take to be philosophy. But that’s really only the collapse of philosophy. And the collapse of religion.


Best let that European world die, rather than go on like this. Better let it simply vanish, rather than preserve it as we do. Forgetting would be a better fate. Rather than ossified. Rather than frozen. Commented upon. Introduced. Contextualised. Ruiners …


The ruiners are at home in the ruins. Their ruins. The ruiners are happy with the ruination, ultimately. Except us! What’s wrong with us?


We’re just part of the ruination. Just another phase of it. We make it happen in new ways.


Livia only wanted us to fail. Success sickened her. Livia only set us up to fail. To ruin. To lay waste.


We despise what we love, even as we think we love it. We destroy it. We vandalise it.

Why did Livia want us to vandalise it?


She loved our love for European thought, Livia. She wanted to unleash it, our love – even as she knew it as destruction. She wanted our love – as ruination. Because we could only ruin what we loved. How painful it was for us! And how loving! And that’s what Livia loved: knowing that we, too, understood we could only destroy what we loved.


Let the world be interesting at least, Livia said. Let the end of the world be entertaining. Let wrong things happen rightly, and the right things happen wrongly Let there be confusion. A pell mell. Let it all unleashed. Let the end become more feverish. More febrile. More intense.