Arthur

Admittedly, I possess very little patience for people, there little intricacies which require you to dance around the social dalliances, the how-do-you-do's, if you will, the pardon-me's arising like minute burps after the minutest of infringing graces, the failure to cover your mouth when yawning or masticating with an open jaw, the expelling of fluctuance in the most obtrusive manner, clamorous and odorific. Ultimately, humans have done nothing to discern themselves with any credulity from the alleged lower forms for, despite all the combined efforts of mankind over the numerous millennia, humans never managed to shed the animalistic functions of their host forms. Despite the volumes of tomes dedicated to the betterment of mankind's moral and spiritual function, despite the wondrous and miraculous discoveries of visionaries like Plato and Socrates, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, all of these men of brilliance were all compelled by the basic desires and functions of all men, even the lowest and vilest of men, to nourish their bodies with food and to copulate, to forge out a parcel of land, whether physical or existential, which they might possess to the exclusion of all others.

Simply stated and with no intended disservice to the Bible, humans hold no authority over any creature of this Earth for they wallowed in the pits of evolutionary drives of all animals, including dung beetles. And so, I saw most humans as such, merely overly decorated dung beetles, pushing themselves around in the World's filth.

Don't get me wrong. I did not distinguish myself any differently from other humans. I, too, am as lowly as the dung beetle. It's just that I recognize the mechanism that drives the World, the cogs we humans are, driving an ecosystem, placed not on top of a food chain heap, but rather in a machine-like process of living and dying, operating side-by-side by our neighbor the maggot who feeds upon us when we finally lose steam and lay prone in a bed of dirt.

The words I scribble here, they too are subject to such decay, and one day, the ink that composes the curvature of the s's and the crosshairs of the t's, will fade, lighter and lighter as their readers eyesight grows dimmer and dimmer until they are no longer discernible. And then, the parchment on which the illegible words have been scribed will dry and become brittle, and then fracture, first at the edges and at the folds until tiny rivers of fault lines will interior to the paper and render apart that which had held so strong for so long.

Shakespeare was a fool when he wrote: "...where, alack, Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid? O! none, unless this miracle might, That in black ink my love may still shine bright." Where is his beauty now? What is she but a poor imitation hiding between words, and not even his own original words printed on his own possessed parchment, but his words spoken and written by others, repeated oft and the speaker or writer with little knowledge of whom they speak, only that such tender thoughts were constructed by such a wordsmith who is himself more famous than the woman, nay, the very thought of the woman, of whom he wrote. And what do scholars know of Shakespeare, no more than that he was a person whom wrote plays and poetry, or persons, who borrowed plots from other plays, and was not afraid of low brow comedy.

It wouldn't be wrong to call me a pessimist. I don such nomenclature willing. Darkness exists within me. But exists within you to reader because it exists in all of us. Shakespeare wrote in folly and jest, even when he wrote with earnestness, but Nietzsche wrote sincerely and truthfully when he scribed, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster, And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

He places his pen back into its stand on the wooden counter desk, his large, heavy spectacles composed of multiple lenses flamed out like thin slices of bubbles around his faces. The spectacles were attached to his face by a rather large and raw looking leather strap tied tightly at the back of his head. He could only utilize the spectacles for no more than an hour before a terrible headache spread across the occipital lobes of his skull like little forked lightening. However, he had grown accustomed to the use of the spectacles to inspect the many things that had fallen onto his desk, adjusting the lenses when necessary to inspect, that he had become feeble without them, and more particular, could only see in the most general of ways without them. With the spectacles, he could read the print of any letter or tract, no matter had ill-written or cramped the cursive had been. He could