All alone in the night.

[caladri]

The great monster of cosmic terror must be circumstance. Circumstance is worse than fate because it is fate made immediate and manifest, it is utterly inescapable because it rests in the present moment. It isn't enough that there are unimaginable voids into which one can be lost, but the sinking feeling that one might already be within one is the

Comments

[marzipan_pig]

I just had to leave work early in an albuterol-induced disorienting panic. It is weirdly reassuring to read that this is perhaps more an underlying norm I tapped into rather than Something Is Wrong With Me.

[caladri]

It's definitely something that grips people, or it wouldn't be possible to describe even as hamfistedly1 as I did2. Like, it's not all of us humans but a lot of us who find things that pose (direct) existential threats to the whole Earth terrifying, particularly because they may already be happening without our knowing, things like massive bursts of radiation hurtling eventually towards us, or meteors, or what have you.

One has to be sensitive to the feeling of inescape from them, which not everyone is. Some people can shrug it off just as surely as they might assert that for all intents and purposes the moon might as well be a matte painting, and not a massive rock far outside of our control and intricately-linked to our living or dying. And some people think it's cute or clever when people talk about Spaceship Earth or similar imagery, having never grasped the fact that it is real and not abstract or hypothetical.

Our actual circumstance is in living on this fragile little rock, and whether it is terrifying comes down to

[twoeleven]

In the most terrifying of all possible worlds, everything would be mind-melting horror.
I think in that world, everything might be mind-melting horror, but you couldn't tell until it is too late to do anything about it.

[caladri]

It would be too late to do anything about it before you were born. But somehow and cruelly your species will still know what hope is, what peace is, and always know they will have none of it.

I mean really, we're all only-slightly maladjusted by the fact that all of us will some day surely die. I have to wonder what people would be used to in the most terrifying of all possible worlds. I'm not sure you can make much of an argument that we don't live in it. Just enough darkness and just enough light to leave room for ever being utterly and horrifically terrified. How many people could spend 10 minutes looking at each of the 93 photos Reuters say are the best of the year? It is a terrible thing to confront even a small portion, even for a short while, even in the comfort of a relatively-safe and -secure home (and such considerable distance besides) the horrors that play out daily upon this planet.