2012.02.09
He is brilliant, yes, but evil.
So evil I despair of comprehending him.
This man doesn't want to murder his
father and possess his mother: he wants
to murder God and possess the cosmos.
He would tear the earth from its
foundations and throw the oceans from
their beds, pausing only to lick the salt
from his fingers. His strength is the
strength that extends beyond sanity.
I know not the origin of these
desires. As a child he would dream of
shaping the hills by the clapping of his
hands, the nodding of his head. Entire
nations would be his plaything, all of
literature a decoration for his room.
As he grew, so did his imaginings.
He saw himself capturing souls in glass
bottles, of folding the sky into quarters
and using it to wipe the sweat from his
forehead. He planned to suck the
atmosphere into his lungs in one breath,
to still storms with a word. He studied to
distill a dream that could cause a
nightmare to bolt from its sleep. He
searched to make the atoms cry out in
pain.
And now, what more is to be
said? His rage grow every day. I knew
him once, he recognizes me no longer. I
will gaze at him, and tremble.
--I wrote this in college. The first 5 lines (up to "cosmos") I found on Usenet, but turn out to be from the "Illuminatus!" trilogy, which I have just read for the first time.
The whole thing is not as good as the original passage, but hey.
Definitely digging workflowy.com/ - its core is just hierarchical bullet lists w/ zoom-and-breadcrumbs but it nails focus vs "forget me not"s
Ironically enough, "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is the first Kindle book I run into with "Due to publisher restrictions, copy is not allowed for this title." when I go to copy and paste a sentence or two.
"If there were more bloody noses, there'd be fewer wars."
I Seem to Be a Verb.