Sacrifice

I would like to make sacrifices – sleep, nourishment, happiness – if those sacrifices meant a brush with greatness. What miseries would I not endure if I knew they would guarantee a fine style, something worthwhile? Worthwhile is the key – because time splits into smaller infinities, wasted – because every day can be quantified, and I feel that with all the rushing sand, my life is ebbing away. So I would gladly give this time, which is wasted and useless, for some eternal quality beyond time, a timelessness saturate of time, something I could hold in my hands and keep. This is useless.

Suppose that I did write my great work, my chef-d'oeuvre, where even the paper is vellum thick, and the ink is stainless gold, and the sounds are like charming music, and the meanings are like magic – with the power to move mountains, turn back streams, draw the moon and blot the skies with an inky blackness – even so, what will become of me? What will become of it?

These sounds will decay as soon as they are heard, even the most precious ink is wasted, the paper will be worm-eaten dust, and in a thousand years, little will be left of me. My corpse will be ashes, my flesh corrupt, my bones rotten and brittle, barely preserved; further, the civilization in which I lived will be decayed and rubble strewn – already new homes are sprouting up like weeds, already children are born with their hungry eyes – nature is like a giant fungal growth, springing constantly from itself, always giving way to the new, and the old are eaten and utterly dispersed, so that even if the totality is the same, nothing is recognizable, all is constant flux. At best perhaps we are like coral – but I do not want my dead words to accumulate like so many monstrous skeletons. I will never be alive again.

So perhaps this is a ritual of redemption – these words that stream unceasingly, possibly even to vexation, time evaporating, so many half-remembered sentences from other books contributing to the awkward mass such that it itself appears already like the accretions of meaningless coral, the spectacular waste of centuries; perhaps this is a ritual of redemption in which I slaughter time, and myself, and finally my breath, so that my spirit will rise to the gods, who I think do not hear our prayers, as some sweet incense, before its dispersal in the winds, before it becomes mixed with everything else in the earth. This I know: it pleases me. I would sacrifice on the altar of my own ambition if it would bring me peace.