Atropos
Created | Updated Nov 19, 2003
There is a gulf too awesome for your feeble mind. Your imagination is a guttering spark in its boundless shadow.
Humility is a virtue of the Best of Men, but the lesson you must learn is more than this. Come with me, and confront your insignificance.
Here, at the beginning, you shrink from the sun. You recoil in dismay from the wrinkle at your temple. Mummified while you yet live, your hide is turned to leather.
You fear the radiation that pours from this star. You characterise it as your corruptor. Where mankind synthesises a paltry facsimile, you shudder and blabber about the perils of wanton science.
You do not even appreciate that mutation of cells is the Essence of All Life. You would deny the vital shower that bathes you.
And yet this spring-like drizzle of energy is a faint echo of the searing flux that once scarified your planet. As the pulses cycle faster, matter itself becomes ephemeral. Everything must change through this Alchemy of Oblivion. Behold the terrible Fuel of Nature.
Frequency. Sawing upwards into this devastating storm, its magnitude soon overwhelms your comprehension. But it has a denominator, better founded in your consciousness.
This mounting scream is a thing of Time itself. It made this spinning rock from debris spewed from the Cosmic Forge. Among the countless embers, it blasted it and purged it. The fabric of this earth has been rent and sewn a million times, between times cleansed in fire and in that which is beyond fire.
And every cycle of destruction and rebirth fashions a step in a Staircase of Eternity. Each crashing blow of the Hammer of Time conjures a new world. To negotiate each step, life itself must be stripped back to a raw and malleable state. The price of each footfall is Extinction.
In this fleeting moment, your seething progeny infest one single foothold on the mountainside. Everything you see and everything you know belongs to this pathetic wrinkle in a rockface, so vast that no creature you can imagine will ever scale it.
Do you finally see how insignificant you are?
You are scum.
You will soon be swept away and utterly forgotten.
Your achievements will leave not a scratch on this Wall of Time that dwarfs you.
There is indeed an Ocean of Truth, and these are shells and pebbles.
You play with the atom, and the sun burns above your head.
You make gods in your own image, and creation grinds onward beyond your understanding.
Jesus and Newton are of your step. They will die with you. Believe nothing else, if you would even for a moment raise your eyes towards a Higher Place.
Behold the True Lathe of Heaven.
Behold Time.
