The Collapse CXXI: Return (The Second Entry)

30 June 20XX+1 - Later

My Dear Lucilius:

It is seldom that I write twice in a day – especially at night, when I am now using hoarded power to see (which, to be fair, can be recharged – but there is the principle of the thing).

Simply put, I cannot sleep.

I tried to go back my notes and type them up more fully but found I could not even open the journal. Which is, objectively a ridiculous thing as it merely a book of my thoughts. Subjectively though, I cannot even bring myself to pick it up yet.

How, you might ask, could a simple book of pen and paper confound my very efforts to read it?

Because of what it represents.

Not at all what you are thinking, I imagine. Not what happened out there – although that itself is something that I am having enough trouble with. I tried to express my words to Pompeia Paulina but found myself almost in tears.

No, it is everything that it represents: a lost way of life.

Part of me, I suppose, had held out hope that what we have experienced for the last year or so was temporary thing. The bias of normalcy I suppose one might call it. I know, I know: you have often chided me for holding a mysterious contradictory combination of dire catastrophism and a seemingly endless hope that things would often right themselves. And strangely enough in my own personal life, they often did.

But my personal life is not the world.

We had often commented in our dinners – back when we still lived near enough to have them – that the modern world was bound by a million threads, carefully knit together into a whole. Remove one or two or even twenty and the overall fabric would look a little disheveled, but not come part. But at some point if one removes enough threads – or simply cuts them apart – the integrity of the fabric would begin to fail. Remove enough threads and it would simply fall apart.

I have come back understanding that too many threads have been pulled.

Perhaps we all go through this moment, Lucilius: the moment of realization that the thing is really true, that our parents really are gone or the marriage is over by divorce or death or the lifestyle enabled by the job we had is never coming back. It is at that moment that we can do one of two things: we can simply continue to look away, knowing that we are doing so intentionally, or face the fact that things simply are what they are and we need to operate on the situation as it has been revealed.

It need not be sad of course; epiphanies and reality checks are neither happy nor sad, they just are. Or as Master Oogway said in that martial arts classic Kung Fu Panda, “There is just news. There is no good or bad.”

Pompeia Paulina is reminding me that it is now much later than when I originally wrote and that it is high time that I come to bed.

It is almost High Summer, but I feel the chill of Winter in my bones already.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca