Max > Recent Status Updates

I was suddenly overtaken by the beauty of this grand mechanical ballet glittering in the weightless, pale blue sunlight.

I am merely copying down the announcement that appeared in today’s One State Gazette word for word:

In 120 days, construction of the INTEGRAL will be complete. The glorious, historic hour when the first-ever INTEGRAL will blast off into outer space is nigh.

What we crave from others far more than money or material assistance is love and attention. A family man who receives neither is not a family man at all: he is merely putting a roof over the heads of strangers.

Perhaps she’d been all I needed. I suppose that is what any of us need: one single person.

”You would marvel if by certain conditions
there should suddenly grow on apple and orange trees, instead of fruit, frogs and lizards, and if roses should begin to breathe the odour of a sweating horse. So do I marvel at you, who have bartered heaven for earth. I do not want to understand you.”

There was no answer. Evidently the watchman had taken shelter from the bad weather and was now asleep somewhere in the kitchen or the greenhouse.

”If I have the courage to fulfil my intention,” thought the old man, “the suspicion will fall on the watchman first of all.”

”They’re both equally immoral,” remarked one of the guests, “ because their purpose is the same, to take away life. The State is not God. It has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should so desire.”

It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was pacing from corner to corner of his study, recalling to his mind the party he gave in the autumn fifteen years before. There were many clever people at the party and much interesting conversation. They talked among other things of capital punishment.

Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot
describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

But if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved.

The reason they had tolerated, even loved the work, they will tell themselves, is because the repetitiveness provided a counterbalance to the limitless growth and broad horizons of the rest of their days. Now, they will realise, nothing remains but the work.

In other cases, their friends would simply disappear. The increasingly feverish pace of change in the city was turning against the people who had fuelled it. As they moved closer to their mid-thirties, their friends, even the old-timers, would suddenly decide to move back… but back where? They would use the term ‘back home’, sur­prising even themselves that Berlin was not it.

Anna and Tom did not understand, or at least not explicitly, anyone who could be considered an expat, a term they tended to apply either ironically or judgementally. And yet that term did apply to them, and in the frenzy of their mobilisation and the meta-frenzy of their attempt to theorise that mobilisation, no one was able to say why that abbreviation applied to some expatriates and not to others.

Later on they would fall asleep breathing in each oth­er’s smell, whispering little jokes, sweet nothings, plans for the next day. But really what they were saying was a prayer, a silent and strangely solemn prayer for things to remain exactly as they were. It was always answered.

They loved their families and were nostalgic for the streets they had grown up on, but that fondness would quickly give way to a feel­ ing of stasis and estrangement. Entering the departures terminal, each time they would glance at themselves in the glass doors and think back to the picture they had tak­ en when they left. The comparison never failed to move them. They were so different now.

Did they like the job? Yes, but they would reformulate the question. They did for money now what they used to do out of passion. This was a fact. From this fact they concluded that they had turned their passion into a job. This was a deduction.

The cliques were hotbeds of gossip; conformist attitudes fostered what Anna and Tom felt to be stifling expectations. And among those people – who never changed, who were content to hang out in the same sets they belonged to at school – Anna and Tom weren’t free to be themselves, or rather, they weren’t free to reinvent themselves.

Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-coloured floorboards and casts an emer­ ald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face-down on the seat.

Without seduction by the atopic Other, which sparks erotic desire, thinking withers into mere work, which always reproduces the Same. Calculating thought lacks the negativity of atopia. It is work on the positive. No negativity inspires disquiet or unrest in it.

In contrast, love as an event—as a “Two scene”—is dehabitualizing and denarcissifying. […] Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving and another kind of society. Thereby, it remains faithful to what is yet to come.

… but how?