Lucifer's Curse

It’s done.

Now it is only me alone with my thoughts. No. Alone with only one thought. A question that has haunted me for months. A question that holds the strings of my fate in its incorporeal grasp.

What if I fail?

What then? Where will I go? Do I give up on science? Maybe I want that. Maybe I’m trying to fail myself to get out of this, maybe I’m just not cut out for it, maybe I’m rejecting it arbitrarily because it’s what everyone else in my family has done. Maybe…

What if I fail?

I seek solace in the glittering simplicity of the arcade. Pinball is nirvana. It doesn’t raise questions, it doesn’t attack your insecurities, it doesn’t challenge my world view, it doesn’t threaten the security of my future. It’s simple. I don’t have to think, I don’t have to bear the unbearable burden of my own humanity. I can let my mind die.

And that’s what it is. That’s what they all are. Every drink, every drug, every game, every distraction and bland amusement that we have constructed for ourselves; each of them is just another way to release ourselves from the burden of thought. We escape from reality into a world where the rules are simple. Play the game, watch the movie, hear the story, drift away in the intoxication of the drug. But then we are always inevitably flung from our own perfect dreamless sleepwalk back into the bleak miasma of reality. None of the questions have been answered in our absence; none of the problems have been solved. All we’ve done is give ourselves less time to solve them in, and yet for that one brief instant of perfect anti-enlightenment, an instant with the absolute opacity of thought, we readily sacrifice our most precious of resources. Truly, Ignorance must be bliss.