Human Mortality
My name is Ender Williams and I am my own God. From my lofty throne I can look down at all the symmetrical houses and all the symmetrical lives and I can laugh. I can look down at the city of such great stature, where so many dreams have come to live, and even more have come to die. I can look and laugh at the idealistic beliefs that brought them to those buildings that dwarfed their lives, and I can laugh because right now I dwarf those buildings.
As for me, I have a dream of putting my pen to the paper and following to the ends of the Earth or to the grave, whichever I may reach first. And there's a Utopia that lives in my mind and on a map where the sun always shines and the grass is never brown or dead or covered with snow as it is now as I look out of my window. A place where the ink will flow from my brain like the water from their automatic sprinklers, and I will sleep until noon and wake up with an idea so eager to get out that it causes me a migraine.
Here I will have no need of others other than the need to observe. And if all that individualism has me feeling lonesome, I will find someone to spend the night with and the next morning I will get up and get on with my self-centered life before the scent of their perfume has faded from my hands.
And if you see me as a monster, so be it. I will give you a few of my theories on how one's life can go so terribly awry from the plan that was set for him when he was born, the plan of his father and his father's father and so forth. Maybe it was the concussion. Maybe the blood that seeped from my brain dried to a scab, a scab that holds in all my reliance for outside sources, my trust for fellow man and the God who brought me good fortune as a child. Perhaps it was the part of my brain that had no need for proof, and actually believed in the magic of the universe that was so violently bruised on that field.
Or maybe it wasn't the concussion at all. Maybe it was that day in November when I lost the last ounce of God that lived outside my own mind. The day that that last ounce of magic went down into the sewer along with the melted snow and the final imprint of our bodies together which that snow held.
In the end, none of this matters. If one of those screws on the wing outside my window, screws that were manufactured by an Indonesian five-year-old earning 20 cents an hour, happens to break, every single intangible thing which I have created or stood for will go tumbling towards the ground at 700 MPH, and will disintegrate upon impact. Every thought and dream will be gone, and all that will be left will be the things you are reading right now on the imaginary space that is the internet, and the smudges of ink that have attempted to bring those intangible things to life, those smudges that are far more immortal than the hands which made them. And God will be dead.
E.W.
As for me, I have a dream of putting my pen to the paper and following to the ends of the Earth or to the grave, whichever I may reach first. And there's a Utopia that lives in my mind and on a map where the sun always shines and the grass is never brown or dead or covered with snow as it is now as I look out of my window. A place where the ink will flow from my brain like the water from their automatic sprinklers, and I will sleep until noon and wake up with an idea so eager to get out that it causes me a migraine.
Here I will have no need of others other than the need to observe. And if all that individualism has me feeling lonesome, I will find someone to spend the night with and the next morning I will get up and get on with my self-centered life before the scent of their perfume has faded from my hands.
And if you see me as a monster, so be it. I will give you a few of my theories on how one's life can go so terribly awry from the plan that was set for him when he was born, the plan of his father and his father's father and so forth. Maybe it was the concussion. Maybe the blood that seeped from my brain dried to a scab, a scab that holds in all my reliance for outside sources, my trust for fellow man and the God who brought me good fortune as a child. Perhaps it was the part of my brain that had no need for proof, and actually believed in the magic of the universe that was so violently bruised on that field.
Or maybe it wasn't the concussion at all. Maybe it was that day in November when I lost the last ounce of God that lived outside my own mind. The day that that last ounce of magic went down into the sewer along with the melted snow and the final imprint of our bodies together which that snow held.
In the end, none of this matters. If one of those screws on the wing outside my window, screws that were manufactured by an Indonesian five-year-old earning 20 cents an hour, happens to break, every single intangible thing which I have created or stood for will go tumbling towards the ground at 700 MPH, and will disintegrate upon impact. Every thought and dream will be gone, and all that will be left will be the things you are reading right now on the imaginary space that is the internet, and the smudges of ink that have attempted to bring those intangible things to life, those smudges that are far more immortal than the hands which made them. And God will be dead.
E.W.