Excerpts from Nostos
286.
THE PARABLE OF THE TAX COLLECTOR
He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
There was once an honest man who lived alone. He grew his own food by working hard under the sun with his own two hands until they bled. For drink, he traveled to the nearby river and drew fresh water from the stream. For warmth, he chopped down trees and lit them ablaze against the cold. And at night he guarded himself, his house and his work from the howling wolves that came from the forest, under the cold cover of darkness. Verily, his life was tough, but it was all his. He did not think of what was good or bad, he just accepted things as they were. It is what it is, he'd always think to himself, as if it was a new truth each time. But one day a wandering traveler came walking in the distance. The honest man watched carefully, and waited. The wandering traveler approached with a smile, as they often do, gave a courteous bow and began his memorized speech.
– Sweet friend, we have come to admire your life and your life's work. Verily, what you have built for yourself is quite the wonder, and much deserving of our admiration. However, we have also come to collect due tribute. The fire that warms you, did it not come from trees that do not belong to you? The water that quenches your thirst, did it not come from a river you did not set in motion? And the food that soothes your belly, did it not arise from a land you did not raise? In truth, all things belong to us. Thus, we move with due diligence, we have come to collect payment for what you have borrowed. In return we can hold off the wolves that haunt you. Such is our promise and our promise is true.
Though the honest man already knew every word, he still listened, paying the wandering traveler no more than his respect. And after a moment, which was no more than a brief sigh, the honest man replied.
– What I have I have made myself. The fire that warms me came from my mind when I created an axe to cut down a tree with no name, the water that quenches my thirst came from the travels I made to a river with no name, and the food that soothes my belly came from the work of my own two hands, tilling a land with no name. I am of the day as the wolves are of the night. They are my curse for leaving the lands of men, a curse I willingly embraced. I need no respite from them.
– You mistake us, friend. Your sharp mind, did it not come from us? Your long travels, were they not journeyed through our roads? And your tired hands, were they not made with our clay? We wish for nothing except for you to pay due tribute, to which we are most certainly entitled. Yet if you refuse us you leave us no choice.
– I ask for nothing of this world. I won't have anything that isn't mine by right. Take as you wish.
And so the honest man was ordered to bring forth his arms. The wandering traveler drew a dagger from within his cloak. With complete indifference, he swung his arm high up and cut through the man's wrist, letting the lifeless hand fall to the earth. Then, on a whim, he sheathed his dagger, leaving the honest man's other hand intact, maybe intending to take it on some other day... or maybe not.
295.
TO KEEP THE BAD MEN AWAY FROM THE DOOR
The world runs on violence for the just and the unjust alike. Eventually we are all forced to do violence or to suffer it. A peaceful man is simply one who is shielded by the violent ones, a peaceful society is simply one that is doomed to be conquered, whether by barbarians or by the traitors within. And this is why bad men are necessary, men capable of doing the things nature decreed to be vile to our moral sensibilities, and yet so necessary in our lives. They are men who do not shy away from it, who do not live with utopian delusions of what life should be. For there are in fact wicked ones who know how the world really is, the ones who are capable of any form of violence, and those men will inevitably take advantage of the weak, they will even find it difficult to contain their laughter at the idea of coexistence and the humiliation that are any and all peace offerings. The bad men are in tune with nature in its raw form, they act on the world and thereby create it, which means that the world is thus in constant violence. The weak men are those who either deny their nature or are incapable of acting in accordance with it, so instead they daydream of a society where everyone lives perpetually in peace. But such a thing is impossible, the world would become stagnant, lethargic, people would become bored, complacent and they would eventually forget what it really took to achieve paradise... Nature functions based on birth, suffering and death, and so only the strong will die after accomplishing what they wanted. Any utopia would cradle and nurture the weak, give them long and quiet lives, it would inflate the currency of human resources and, simply by virtue of existing, the weak would think themselves equal to the strong, as if nature has been somehow conquered... But they are always weak, and their perceived value is a delusion. And so they collapse the whole empire from within, opening the gates to the barbarians and then kneeling to them.
And quite often the true barbarians are not outsiders as such, they're not always mere conquerors. Indeed, they are demons who lurk very deep within the high walls. They are people born or shaped with a strange capacity for what an average man considers to be evil but that they consider to be desirable, perhaps even good. They act on their wicked impulses with a distinct mix of joy and indifference in causing so much suffering to others, even to defenseless animals and small children, much to the shock of the vast majority of the population. Some of these monsters are born, others are created through the eternal repetition of cycles, but in the end it doesn't matter. What matters is that they exist, they even exist dormant in an otherwise normal man. If so, it would then seem that somewhere deep within, every man has the capacity to be a monster. It has been said, when fighting monsters one should beware so as to not become a monster, but I say it otherwise, I say only a monster can fight another monster, no man can remain good while fighting evil things. And to think that we can bring about a time when the world will no longer be violent is just childish. Because the world is violent by its very nature, it is violent right down to its bones, and if you don't see it then you have someone far beyond your castle walls ready to do violence on your behalf. Rejoice that you don't have to be that someone for somebody else... But be ready anyway, just in case.
308.
THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE WORLD
The world is a sphere, floating in a dark void. It is pierced with a spike from one end to the other that tilts it on its axis. And in the middle of that spike is a wheel. The constant turning of that wheel, buried so deep within the crust, is what rotates the earth, and the meaning of that rotation is the history of the world. And due to the very nature of the wheel, its history is a history of violence, for the oils that keep the machinery turning are flesh and blood, and thus in truth, it is the continuing existence of living creatures and their eventual death that sustain the world. The wheel draws beings towards its center in opposite directions from each pole, and those opposing forces create a spiral, twisting and turning from one way to the other, until whatever reaches the middle is inevitably crushed... The gruesome result is the processed flesh of whatever was there before, now flattened into the ground for the wheel to continue on turning with new fresh blood to smooth out its hinges. Nature subsists by creating the life it eventually kills, and thus we are born from impounded flesh only to one day become impounded flesh once again. The world is a slaughterhouse.
We even find this very notion mimicked all throughout human history. There's this stagnant idea of population, the abstract notion of the sum total of inhabitants of the world, or specifically of a certain land. And then specific individuals rise up from that abstract to become individualized, like fish leaping from the river, forever attempting to change its course. As far as human history is concerned, they do indeed affect change, for better or for worse, I suppose, but the abstract notion that is the overall population forever remains the same. Even after great wars or pestilence, people always survive and carry on. The change in history is made by the suffering and the inevitable deaths of the masses who do suffer great pain and die in untold numbers just so that the threads of causality may unfold. The great men rise above the lesser ones but even they do not escape the cruel mistress that is nature, for eventually they too become fodder for her, they too feed the creature's gaping maw. Thus, we are no more than slaves to the world, our bodies are not our own, we inevitably return our borrowed backs to the wheel for its cruel purpose to be fulfilled again and again, by twisting and turning and breaking us, with complete indifference.
Is it all worth it? We read about any event in the history of mankind and we always find, written almost in passing, the estimates of how many people suffered and died, be it by man or nature, and the memory of their pain is a little abstract feeling, a nameless thing except for a vague word in the fantasy we make of history. But what if we imagine each death as that of a unique and separate human being? We are thus giving a birthday and a name, a story and dreams and fears, we are granting reality to each human being that ever existed since the world began, going so far as to imagine we were born in their circumstances if it helps, which it probably won't if we consider we cannot avoid the trap of solipsism, and empathy is thus very seldom altruistic... But regardless, is it all worth it? The untold suffering of one single person for the continuing existence of human life through history? Animals may well be slaves to their programming, slaves to all of their ugly natural instincts, they may well breed by the hundreds so that a few of their offspring live on, simply because sheer numbers always beat the odds. Still, must we breed as they do? Must we shape more flesh and blood and bones only for them to be crushed and powdered into dust by the wheel of the world? Couldn't we just refuse the world by neglecting to feed it, thus allowing it to slow down and dwindle into rust? In all honesty I don't know, but even if we can't I still think we should.
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