Abandon Ship!

Hope

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And so the wheel of misfortune continues on its merry circuit.

Round and around and round she goes … where she’ll stop nobody knows; misery and worse the prizes …. her generosity bounded only by the number of heads upon which to bestow it … no unfortunate overlooked on her round around the World … the Princess of Pain, Milady Malady, Duchess of Despair, Countess of Calamity … the baroness of broken hearts on the road to ruination and be damned all ye whose path she crosses on her way.

Too much heartache leaves a hole in our hope, but too many dashed hopes leave a hole where our heart used to be — “Now I don’t believe her / She’s a deceiver / She just lies” as the Monkees never sang, but no doubt had cause to later in Life.

If Pandora had kept her box shut that last time, she would not be the bane of our existence that she is … for, whilst the other evils she infected us with kill us but once, Hope kills us a little more inside day by day.

And so it goes, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation … misery compounded upon misery with moments of joy, never true happiness, serving … Truman Show cruel … only to highlight the long, drawn out, mind-numbing, spirit-sapping, soul-destroying reality of our tortured existence.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
[…]
It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

— Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–21, 26–28

Life’s a trial … and then they find you guilty.

Faced with the terrifying loneliness of that prospect, we tell ourselves stories … shadowplays, flickering and false, on the cave walls of our minds, to comfort our selves in the cold and the dark, whilst we pray to the spirit of hope for another way, another day … that we might find peace at last, sure of our place and purpose in the World — we want someone to hold our hand as we wait for the verdict.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

— Philip Larkin, ‘This Be The Verse’

But Time and tide wait for no-one and the moving pen, having written a horror story, moves on … disaster, despair, even death in its wake, the wheel of Time continues, unstoppable, on its path of destruction to the last syllable of recorded time.

“Life … don’t talk to me about Life […] I’ve seen it … it’s awful.”

— Marvin the paranoid android

Life is meaningless and everything dies.

Remember that whenever it seems unbearable.

Because that’s as good as it gets.