Do you believe in all this?
The opera we draft and stage everyday,
just to hide the absurdity of it all.

I tell you don't reason or query,
but embrace and love it.
For it is what it is -
absurd and meaningless,
humorously sublime, and curiously hedonisitic.
With no heaven or hell, no right and wrong,
no history or epics.

I beg you don't worry about eternal itineraries,
or deathbed contemplations of living "a good life,"
for this whisp of being isn't recorded or matters.
Whether you be forgotten in a year or decade,
or be you a Caesar or a Christ, in years a thousand,
what will matter in a millennia will not be us.

Interview with Gore Vidal

Q:  "Why do you think people so desperately want there to be a purpose for humankind?"

Answer by Gore Vidal:  "They don't want to be extinct.  They think if there's a purpose, somebody as wonderful as they is going to be preserved.  I haven't met many people worth preservation, you know, much less their hopes and fears.  They have my sympathy but no more.  I've been close to death a few times.  You do start to think about being snuffed out like a candle but if you're in pain or a more deadly subject, boredom, you can accept it pretty easily."

From an interview with Gore Vidal in this month's "The Humanist" magazine.

Written in the 19th century and oh so apropos today . . .

It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor Americans pursue prosperity.  Ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.  They cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet rush to snatch any that comes within their reach as if they expected to stop living before they had relished them.  Death steps in, in the end, and stops them before they have grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes them.

- Alexis De Tocqueville "Democracy in America"

Drink up

Why if dancing you would be,
There's brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton build on Trent?  (Burton is a brewery)
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried halfway home or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Than the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely much I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Than I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad

Saying Good Bye to the Consumer Driven Holidays

". . . in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls - it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening."

Don Delillo "White Noise"

The Suzerain: Is the judge in McCarthy's Blood Meridian similar to the enigmatic Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness?

Whatever exists, he [the judge] said.  Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked.  He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected.  These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world.  Yet the smallest crumb can devour us.  Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing.  Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.

Barbarians at the gates

... and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christen reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eyes wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Excerpt from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian