Words&Dirt

“‘One thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species.  You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So?  Does it really matter?  Why really are you bothering with attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion book-ending its utter triviality?’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said.  ‘Is this a rhetorical question?’

‘It is a mistaken question.  Meaning is everywhere.  There is always meaning.  Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present.  It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capital M.  Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.’

‘The poor, deluded fools.’

‘I suspect, from your phrasing and your tone of voice, that, as a little earlier, you think you are being sarcastic.  Well, no matter.  However, there is another reaction to the never-ending plethora of unoriginal idiocies that life throws up with such erratic reliability, besides horror and despair.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A kind of glee.  Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever––if one survives; many people choose suicide at this point instead––then one starts to take the attitude, Oh well, never mind.  It would be far preferable if things were better, but they’re not, so let’s make the most of it.  Let’s see what fresh fuckwittery the dolts can contrive to torment themselves with this time.’

‘Not necessarily the most compassionate response.’

‘Indeed not.  But my point is that it might be the only one that lets you cope with great age without becoming a devout hermit, and therefore represents a kind of filter favouring misanthropy.  Nice people who are beginning to live to a great age––as it were––react with such revulsion to the burgeoning horrors that confront them, they generally prefer suicide.  It’s only us slightly malevolent types who are able to survive that realisation and find a kind of pleasure––or at least satisfaction––in watching how the latest generation or most recently evolved species can re-discover and beat out afresh the paths to disaster, ignominy and shame we had naively assumed might have become hopelessly over-grown.’

‘So basically you’re sticking around to watch us all fuck up?’

‘Yes.  It’s one of life’s few guaranteed constants.’”

––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 210-2

“No matter how tempestuous a citizen’s ambitions, they rarely broke the bounds of the Romans’ respect for tradition.  What the Republic fostered it also served to trammel.

And so it had always been.  Rare was a high achiever who had not been oppressed by the resulting sense of tension.  The ideals of the Republic served to deny the very hunger they provoked.  As a result, the fate of a Roman who had tasted the sweetness of glory might often be a consuming restlessness, the gnawing, unappeasable agony of an addict.  So it was that Marius, even in his sixties, and with countless honors to his name, still dreamed of beating his rivals to the commend of the war against Mithridates.  And so it was that Sulla, even were he to win the consulship, would continue to be taunted by the example of his old commander.  Just as Marius’s villa outshone all others on the Campanian coast, so too did his prestige outrank that of any other former consul.  Most men were confined by precedent and opportunity to holding the consulship once in their lives.  Marius had held the office an unprecedented six times.  He liked to claim that a fortuneteller had promised him a seventh.

No wonder that Sulla loathed him.  Loathed him, and dreamed of winning the same greatness that Marius had won.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 1120-32