Andy's+COLLAPSE+Cogitations

2210: The Contumely (The Proud Man’s)

“You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?” Nietzsche's Zarathustra ponders in the prolegomenon of his eponymous novel. The notion that our noble dust may one day stop a bunghole - it obfuscates, objurgates, and obnubilates the very soul. It is the notion that the trinkets and bijous and contrivances with which we coruscate to and fro amidst the self-adulation of our civilization, from our manuscripts to our toilets to our automobiles, might be seared and scrutinized under the glaring, grandiloquent lens of a microscope, or some such apparatus, and it rather puzzles the will, We, in our nugacity-affrighted nescience, regardless of the cornucopia of corroborative contentions therein, have not hitherto acquiesced to the deduction that life, in its leprous-ly lapidary legerdemain, does, in sooth, creep in a petty pace, to the last syllable of recorded time, and the modern world, in which we are the players, no mater how scintillating, sagacious, or sophisticated, is entrenched within said pace, and we have been lighted the way to dusty death. It portends a presumptuousness, of sorts, to prognosticate that which might be. Firstly, the ignoble and ignominious ignoramus that is man is seldom capable of deducing such matters. Yet when he does so, whilst cerebrating with statistics and algorithms and extrapolations, it is as exceptionable - nay, unconscionable - as endeavoring to comprehend the poetry of a bard with a mathematician’s mien. The firmament of philosophy, pedagogy, and ideology is wholly another matter... Nonetheless, the contemplation, cockamamie and cockalorum-like, that our society, or rather, this sanguinary, societally-sustained salmagundi of sound and fury, in which we grunt and sweat under a weary life, has transcended the empires of the Romans or the Mayans quite mystifies myself. Yet, in one aspect, we have procured a peculiarity which distinguishes, and perhaps disenfranchises, ourselves... To elucidate, from the Byzantine regions to Qin China to even Alexander’s own Macedonia, there was, invariably, another nation or entity that would supersede the sepulchral, fallen empire before it. Whilst not every society sustained itself, overall human society had. But if our civilization, having been irrevocably unified since the Great War, evanesces into the dust and detritus of Father Time’s chronicles, then we will, all and sundry, evanesce together. Humanity’s unity will be its undoing.