Sunday 9 January 2011

January 9- Warning

I am going to tell you something you will one day know to be true, and so to warn you that there will come a time when you cannot dismiss what I am about to say. You may dismiss what I write as a fiction, and to do so is fine- but you will at least know, in the future when it is too late, that there was at least one other person who had realised what was to come.

What will happen to you in the future is this: some day, earlier than you expect, a number of your friends will begin to die. When this happens you will feel more grief than you perhaps realise now, and you will find that even as you become better at funeral speeches and purchasing gravestones that things never become easier. And you will find your circle of friends becomes fewer and fewer, and there will be a day when the last one goes, and you will be the ancient one at the edge of the wake, telling stories of things noone else remembers. At this point you will be sadder than you had ever thought possible, but -if you have forgotten this warning- you will not have realised the dreadful truth.

You may suspect, when you become the oldest person in the world, that things do not quite work in the way you had assumed they did, and this suspicion will grow when you become the oldest person who ever lived, first by a year, then fifty, and before long five hundred. At some point you will realise that you will in fact never die, and if you are unfortunately bright you will realise what this means about the world. For if you are not extraordinary what has happened to you must have happened to everyone, and if that is true they too have found themselves in worlds where they are the oldest thing alive, having split away some time when you were both too young to know any better. And, terribly, it follows that nobody you now live with will be with you forever -if they are even with you now- for their lives will too diverge into places they cannot escape, and they too will find they can never die.

And so my warning to you is this: remember that you are with other people now, and remember to hold them close to you while none of you is special in the universe, and to fear the day when each of you will be. Remember too how terrible death is, and remember -though you will have an eternity to reflect upon this- that there is indeed something which is far, far worse.

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