The Science in Pitfalls.

“Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind, in the commonplaces of the asylum where the cracked mirror or my own selfish death outstared me. And if I tried to give you something else, something outside of myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope. I tapped my own head; it was glass, an inverted bowl. It is a small thing to rage in your own bowl. At first it was private. Then it was more than myself; it was you, or your house or your kitchen. And if you turn away because there is no lesson here, I will hold my awkward bowl, with all its cracked stars shining like a complicated lie, and fasten a new skin around it as if I were dressing an orange or a strange sun. Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there. There ought to be something special for someone in this kind of hope. This is something I would never find in a lovelier place, my dear, although your fear is anyone’s fear, like an invisible veil between us all… and sometimes in private, my kitchen, your kitchen, my face, your face.”

- Anne Sexton, (For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further)

For those who insist upon the reception of my reluctant and socially-suicidal answers, I can bring myself to deny the opportunity for a satisfying kill. I would not lay myself down on the chopping block for pure entertainment. I would not throw myself in front of an oncoming train for the show. That is the job of harlequin circus-folk, not me.

I would beg of you not to make me emerge from the shadowed utopia in which I dwell, but I doubt if that would do much good at all. Asking nicely has never paid off too much for those who are determined to die, with a 9-mil at the nape of their pleading necks. It wouldn't be fair to consider it a way out or an emergency exit. Fairness has never really been a part of the game.

So I will sit, left to eternally spy upon the beautiful people below, who by this point look near as ants from my mountain pedestal. I will watch as they hurry around, never stopping or wondering from whence the strong east wind blows about their crumbs. They will just scramble about to regather their scraps and proceed on with their autonomic lives, each consumed in his own.

Maybe I will never know how or why the way thing are came to be. Perhaps I will never look upon the face of the Creator upon whom every creature depends for a yearly rain. Maybe I do not know or see anything at all, just a mirage created within my mind of things that I wish were there.