Going On

The great lesson is that banality wins. Is that the mundane wins. The world will last forever.

Will it?


You can cry for the end all you want. You can think that cry is the purest cry of all. But the end won’t come. Nothing will actually happen. Death isn’t going to come because you want it to. Isn’t that the great lesson?


The disgusting will always be disgusting and it won’t mean anything. Isn’t that painful?


Bathos is what you’re frightened of. The everyday – that’s the most frightening thing of all to you. Ordinary life and ordinary people. The world just going on. Imagine that: the world just going on. Look at you shudder.


Because you think it’s all in terribly bad taste, this going on. This endless survival. You think you’re in some kind of bad taste – so bad, that it should offend Someone. God maybe. Who would just strike you out.

The fact is that there is no Good Taste. That the adults aren’t in the room. That God’s not in his heaven …

Anything goes in these times. It’s just contortion in these times. It’s just twistedness, in these times. It’s grotesquerie, that’s all.

And that’s what life is, in these times – continuing beyond the point when it would have to make sense.

Day follows day. Day succeeds day, and what does it amount to? Can’t someone just put us down? Put us humanely to sleep? Wouldn’t that be the thing?


We’ve finished drinking. We can throw the empty bottle down and … what? We can drain it to the dregs and … nothing. Nothing happens. Livia doesn’t return at the moment of our deepest need. Death doesn’t come with his scythe, to cut off our heads. The candle snuffer doesn’t snuff us out. The apocalypse disappoints us.


And we’re still alive, still going. How awful! How awful for everything, how awful for us! Aren’t we all tired of our lamentations? Have we ever done anything other than lament?