This is not nihilism.

He looked pale. His hair was damp with the oil that comes when one has not washed in over a week. He spoke slowly, methodically, completely devoid of emotion. He shook slightly. In his left hand he held his cigarette. The smoke trailed up unimpeded, the only life in an otherwise stale air. 'Nihilism is a rejection. I reject nothing. I accept nothing and embrace it. The way things are, and that others may find them not to be as such, and even that it may bother me that they do.'

'I accept even that this whiff of understanding, which briefly lingers, which already shows hints of slipping away, will soon catch the next draft and be gone for a time or perhaps forever.'

'It doesn't matter. Nothing matters.'

'Except life. But even that is not one to be clung to. Accepted, but as I accept a lover, without expectation and without hope.'

'Its going now I think. And I will let it freely be along its way. I will not struggle and tear its cloth.'

'I can't change that which is beyond myself.'

And that is what he said.

- posted by Sigurd7/05/2004 06:12:00 AM