To the reader,
The following manuscript having come
into my hand, I propose to publish it to you in a series of chapters
on this blog as I have time to transliterate it into typed text from
the mysterious book in which it is all bound up. If I have committed any errors of spelling or grammar in the typing, the error is mine an not the author's.
Thomas Duke
The Decline and Fall of the World
Revisited Yet Once More (circa 2650)
by Andry Na
I was first urged to
compose this series of scholarly readings by an old friend and
colleague Guillermo of the Sixth Arrondissment who has since
tragically fallen victim to an elephant's tusk on one of his safaris.
It is to him and his posterity that I devote this work of history.
There are many questions one should
consider before leaping into a work of this type. If this were a
proper work of scholarship I would devote pages and pages to properly
attempting to contextualize the information being presented below but
for the purpose of brevity which is in the words of the great ancient
scholar Milton Shakespeare 'the soul of wit' I will refrain from
excessive introductions. Let me simply say that this is a work
primarily intended to give students and lay readers an understanding
of why the world as the ancient's knew it collapsed. I am greatly
concerned with the problem of why the world has redundantly both
declined and fallen. I am equally concerned with the absurd theories
of a number of writers of the present age who have written before me.
In the words of the first of the reinitiators
Heimlich-von-Castlereagh Smith: “The scholar's task is equally as
concerned with trodding upon the head of falseness as with giving
birth to truth.” It is my hope that this work fulfills that goal.
In the first several chapters, I will
enumerate and destroy the many false theories which have sought to
explain the world's decline before I proceed to draw my own positive
theory of its decline and fall.
Where should we initiate? Let us begin
with the absurd. Writing in 2320, shortly after the reinitialization
of scholarly work, when the world was under the rule of the Tyrant
Clemens the Fishmonger, the historian Baruch of Dimentia the lesser,
first popularized the theory of decline based on god. This was in his
book, The Decline and Fall of the World
which appears to have been based on other works now lost.1
Modern readers will have some difficulty parsing this word 'god.' It was clearly important to the people of early postmodernity though a wide-ranging scholarly debate has ensued about it in ages since. It may have been an acronym, but in any case, it seems clear that it symbolized a very ancient piece of wisdom or authority which guided them. Again, it is unclear exactly where this piece of wisdom was written but in postmodernity, most people knew about it though many people did not trust it. The fragments which we have are often misleading. For instance, in a fragment dating to 19372 the author writes: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can change, And wisdom to know the difference.” This seems to be some eloquent request for help addressed to the god itself. It is however unclear exactly how the speaker will receive the aid from the god.
Others
seem to have gathered together for the purpose of consulting this god
in Churches,
which
we can only assume to have been places where people went to consult
the god.
Some sources even seem to indicate that people believed themselves to
relate directly to the god, to have their essences merged as the
essences of two humans can be merged to produce pleasure in sex.
Whether the merging of their essences with the god produced this same
kind of pleasure is unclear but a rare contemporary fragment of
extraordinary length seems to reveal just that:
“...the
presence of God was at times also accompanied by manifestations of
trembling, convulsions, writhing, physical weakness or deep sleep.3”
Although
deep sleep is not a symptom of sex, at least as we practice it, it
may have been a symptom which occurred after the merging with the god
yet while it was still present. Other, much later, evidence seems to
imply that in the presence of the god people were compelled to
“involuntarily cry out, often uttering unknowable things in unknown
languages.4”
As for Dr. Saggin's theory that the god was a device of sexual
pleasure, it does not seem consistent with everything we
know about the god, especially the fragments which indicate that the
god was a source of wisdom. His position that the wisdom must have
been transmitted through the device seems equally absurd as it is
known that postmoderns consulted books, at least initially, as
sources of wisdom.
In
any case, before we move forward to explaining Baruch's theory it is
important that we examine some of the evidence which he had available
when he wrote his monumental work. The following quotation is taken
from Archbishop Reicher's Church
in the Age of Postmodernity,
a work of dubious scholarship published by an aging authority on the
god in the year 2280:
“We
cannot posit what the church was like then, we only know it as it is
now. The god was much clearer to people of the modern and early
postmodern era, now we only know it distantly but are capable of
affirming some aspects of the god and its wisdom5
The god was good and the people were made happy by the god. The god
was alive and not as some have erroneously suggested dead. The god
will come back one day in the future and will bring with it the great
joy.”
Despite
the fact that we are dealing with a relatively late source, it
purports to be authoritative and this statement seems to be verified
by the numerous pieces of fragmentary evidence which cannot all be
listed here.
Baruch
seems to have been under the impression that the influence of the
god, whatever it was, caused the people to rely on it too much. He
writes:
“The
people's trust in the god lead them to be uncritical and sheep-like,
the sudden, widely-recognized absence of the god in the year 2089
seems to have caught many of them by surprise and a wild, orgiastic
search was engaged in an attempt to find it. Failing to do so, the people
entrusted the powers of the god to the first among the tyrants:
Benjamin of Upper Clavia...”
In
other places, he assumes that the god had far-reaching powers, that
it was widely accessible to anyone and that it was both a source of
both wisdom and pleasure. Any critical reader will understand that
such a thing clearly could not have existed and suddenly disappeared
in 2089 without anyone noticing it leave. Baruch glazes over this
point, reaffirming the widely-confirmed realization as documented, he
claims, in the great survey of 2089.6
It was clear, Baruch tells us, because the survey encompassed all of
the peoples of the world and was conducted in the universal language
of the period (which thankfully has survived) English. We are in
doubt as to the accuracy of this survey and the whole disappearance
motif.
The
essence of Baruch's theory has already been suggested. The world
declined because the god disappeared. His series of ten books on the
topic encompasses one book describing his thesis and the great survey
of 2089 and the disappearance of the god which he treats rather
uncritically. Another volume is devoted to describing the results of
the god's absence and the rise of the first of the Tyrants. The other
eight volumes are misguided attempts to predict when the god will
return.
There
are at least two plausible reasons why we cannot take Baruch's thesis
seriously. First, it is based on the conclusions of a form of
research since confirmed to be faulty. Measurements by survey have
long since been dismissed as means of arriving at the truth,
especially when it comes to surveys of the uneducated which appears
to have been the method whereby the people discovered the sudden
absence of the god. Is it not possible that they all engaged in
mutual deception regarding the god's disappearance. It is known that
matter can neither be created nor destroyed, this must apply to the
god as well. It is impossible to know what the god was in the first
place but it is this author's belief that the god must still exist
though it is unknown and possibly unrecoverable. We enjoy the
prosperity of an age which has both the benefits of wisdom and
pleasure all as a result of devotion to reason. How is it that the
god could improve on this existence? If it left, it did not leave us
missing anything and so cannot have been the cause of the widespread
pain, decline and horror of the late postmodern period.
Second,
fragmentary evidence of the early and late postmodern period
indicates that there were many individuals who did not trust the god
or consult its wisdom in any way. Professor Watson's assertion that
it was these people who must have spirited the god away is based on
pure speculation. If these people existed, why is it that the great
masses did not turn to them for guidance when the god disappeared, if
it did? If, in fact they did spirit it away, surely they would have
had a plan for replacing it with some other thing. The very existence
of these people would seem to indicate that some people were able to
live without it, why then did the masses become hysterical when its
absence was supposedly first noted.
Baruch's
whole approach to reading and writing history is unreasonable. He all
too often assumes that people of postmodernity were insipidly stupid,
which may have some value as an assumption, but he carries it too
far. It is one thing to show that a people were unaware of
information but to attempt to show that they had no use of their
faculty of reason is utterly absurd. We can say with some certainty
then that if the people of postmodernity were in any way reasonable,
as some of their scholarly work would indicate, that the sudden
absence of the god in 2089 had little to no impact on their decision
to erect the first Tyrant and so initiate the decline and fall of the
world.
_______________________________________________
1
Though there are many titles which bear this label 'Decline and
Fall...' Baruch seems to have based his work on a book now lost, the
title of which can be found in a book list partially preserved in a
fragmented digital file. This popular book appears to have been
“Decline and Fall of the Rom” by E. G. of unknown date though
it appears to have been ancient, possibly dating to the late 700s.
2
Slightly before postmodernity, but the sources are scarce.
3
This fragment comes from a oft-consulted book from the postmodern
era called 'Wikepedia' which bears no relation to Eckhard Thompson's
present-day farcical, comic work of the same name. Some modern scholars,
claim that the god (or his wisdom) could be found in Wikepedia, a
conclusion which however interesting is based purely on speculation.
4
This comes from Archbishop Langley's The Practice of God written
in 2
5
Note the distinction he makes between the god and its wisdom, this
seems to be a later development.
6
A 'survey' seems to have been an absurd form of research, to be
discussed in depth later, which involved polling large amounts of
people to find the truth.
