But what did he know? What was unspeakable was his rendezvous with ruin, his lackadaisical date with too many tomorrows. It remains to be said and silence reigned in the displacement, the movement of all such discussions. The discussions in his, ultimately, in his head.
The discourse lay bare the knowledge that, if it does not determine action, is dead to us. That character is simply habit long continued, and horror is the soul of the plot. We cannot, nor will we ever want to, answer these questions, the ones of our making or not. And Lucky could never be in the position to find that every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
He was an extrovert. He was a man who did. He wasn’t a writer, per se. He could be a thinker and an inventor of sorts. Isn’t every man, the inventor of his own premise? That were to be, his very life? And Lucky knew about life. About his life anyway.
And he feared it. Feared it in a way, because so many people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it. So they necessarily restrain themselves. Inhibition is not unnatural…civilizations are built on restraints. But those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; he told himself, whenever he held back from what might bore him, eventually. In life, you must choose between boredom and suffering. Otherwise, you’ll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to have never lived. We are always getting ready to live but never living. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Fortune favors the brave, but the facts speak for themselves. The devil is God’s ape. And the gorilla that sat on Lucky’s back was getting hungrier by the day. Nothing in excess, was easy to say, if you didn’t know the tale of this journey. Sometimes, the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom. But this road looked like it ended in a place called nowhere. He had to find a way. A chance to change direction.
For, except our own thoughts, there is absolutely nothing in our power. Burning is no answer. I accuse, he said, whirling forward and throwing the monkey off his back. To want to be free is to be free, and there is nothing to fear but fear. Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth, and right now, Lucky was having a vision. Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. The education of the will is the object of our existence and knowledge is the antidote to fear. Victory is a thing of the will; a man could stand up!
But he was going someplace with this, wasn’t he? Didn’t he, after all, have an agenda, a date, an appointment in time? He had to be off. He was late, overdue. He the extrovert, had become a thinker, a poet, a writer, a mime, a discoverer of the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
The voices wouldn’t stop in his head. A poem that is hard to get rid of is a voice that is hard to get rid of. And a voice that is hard to get rid of is a man. It is part of the tradition. Tradition does not mean that the living are dead; it means that the dead are living. Living in our head.
Only a cheap curiosity could desire personal immortality. Man is immortal, but not men. We swim in the ocean that runs through time. All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Lucky drank. He drank from the waters of his ancestors’ thought. He said: “Who then are the true philosophers? Those …who are the lovers of the vision of truth. Art is the communication of ecstasy, and as all things change, yet nothing perishes. And once a thing is written down, it will not be unwritten … once the word is written.
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