Sunshine

Sunshine ephemeral

pierces darkness eternal

and the soul nocturnal

peers out the window.

Briefly, it glimpses

its own reflection

reminding the bearer

that he is but a shadow.

Blessed Night

Night returns. A sense of propriety fills me as the ambience of the world briefly matches that of my mind and soul. Darkness brings a reprieve from the merciless illusions of light. For these few brief hours, the illusions retreat, the torment subsides. I float serenely in the sea of despair; the storm of Hope has left, for a time.

Soon the horizon will lighten, and dread will fill me as it heralds the return of Hope. I shall be tormented by its false promises once again. But for these few blessed hours, my soul is at rest, momentarily free of the illusions of Hope.

Hope.

Just when despair begins to bring a dark sort of comfort, borne of familiarity and stability, the damnable spectre of hope once again returns to taunt and nettle with its illusions. Hope – not true hope, but a memory, a faint sense of expectations once held – entices and compels with unspecific promises. Sometimes, in its capriciousness, the phantom will visit with particularly vivid fantasies, strong enough to fool once again; This time, it’s for real.

The wretch dwells in isolation, an island in the endless sea of despair. Hope fools him into leaving that island, and he wades headlong back into the sea, following an illusory light. Once again adrift, he hears the hollow voice laugh as he realizes that Hope has once again cruelly tricked him. Devoid of any will to resist, and unable to see any point in doing so, he surrenders to the darkness surrounding him.

He vaguely wonders if the ocean will swallow him permanently, or if he will awaken on another desolate, solitary island.

As consciousness fades, apathy retreats for a fleeting moment, allowing a brief, ironic musing: There’s always hope.

The problem.

“The universe is only a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A presage of transition to chaos. Which will carry it away in the end. The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure ‘Victorian fictions’. Only egotism exists.”

H.P. Lovecraft quite beautifully relates the fundamental problem of existence. The vast majority of people never consider it, and of those that do, the vast majority manage to sweep the thought aside and avoid it thereafter.

But what of we few, we who cannot help but realize this, we who are unable to continue the illusion of a higher order, of a greater purpose, or of any purpose at all?

Lovecraft died poor, alone, and miserable.

The point.

My mind has become locked in a neverending loop. It began with the question “what is the point?” Would that this question had never occurred to me…

Point. Purpose. How can you define these words, or convey these concepts? It seems to me that it is impossible to do so without referring to them. In other words, the ideas have no meaning without some preexisting assumption of some overall point.

I do not like to assume anything. Anything built on an assumption has a nasty way of crashing to the ground just when you think it’s getting started.

And so here I am. I’ve been fruitlessly searching for the point for so long that I am forced to conclude that it does not exist. And yet this does not stop me from searching.

I have wandered in search of the light for many years. And it has only gotten darker. So I wonder if there was ever light in the first place. Any direction I look seems brighter than here. But as I try to reach a brighter place, it only grows darker.

So do I keep searching, and grow a little less sane every day? Or stop searching, accept the darkness, and give up any hope of ever seeing the light?

I keep searching…for now.