World Within a Tome Within a World Within a....

I have drunk deep from freshly found wells
My head is afloat, my belly swells.

Cobbled together from words these books deceive. Cobbled together from runes these words deceive. They are unseen future shards of a looking glass not-yet-shattered.

The glimpses afforded deceive by obscuring more than they reveal. The stir of emotions and imaginings relay the one truth, and that truth is that the world itself deceives.

I have drunk deep.
Why am I so thirsty?
It is as though I have forgotten wetness and water
until the flood runs through my mouth
only to plummet down my throat
and leave me with the sullen march of sun:
flow to trickle,
trickle to mud,
mud to dirt,
dirt to dust.

Is it only water?
Or is it something's blood?

Purgatory is a beach,
each grain of sand a tome
each tome a silver looking glass
to worlds we cannot know
it matters not if far or near
or trick of light, they're no less dear
but every perfect pane of glass
that lets us see
lets no one pass
and this is how our hope's undone
by seeing all
and touching none.

***********

I have often said (to myself? I do tend to repeat myself, more than anyone else knows) that the cruelest joke of consciousness, of sentience, of imagination, is that a conscious being whose ancestry was poured into the crucible of suffering and scarcity, can emerge triumphant - only to be endowed at its terminus with the ability to imagine a host of worlds and existences so much greater (in every sense of that word) than its own. Is this the sentient mind's attempt to grasp at the dark machinations of the evolution-machine? It does seem to be the cognitive, self-aware counterpart to the unthinking instinct that instructs the animal and insect, and even the plant, to go forth and multiply. The thinking-machine analyzes instinct and creates its dirty parallel: envision the possibilities, the could-have-beens, every eventuality however remote that the evolution-machine and thinking-machine together might be thrust into. Think of conflict and scarcity and strife beyond all plausibility. Then conjure phantoms of survival's success: riches and resources, ingenuity and willpower to overcome the unforeseen.

And then languish here, in the arid plain of the real. Not a desert, no, nor lush paradise. Everything - struggle and success, hardship and excess, dulled by the rough sandpaper of mundanity.

This is the end of the thinking-machine: taunted by wealth it will never have, haunted by struggles it will never face. Trying to outsmart the cold and meaningless process that unthinkingly gave rise to thinking, and will one day unthinkingly snuff it out.

*********
The writing doesn't have to be all that good, really. Every good story, every good character, hooks me all over again. And then when I've devoured the last scraps and drunk the last drops, I feel a profound emptiness. I saw it so clearly through the pages. My hand, it touched the looking glass. It almost went through. Didn't it?

Didn't it?