ADAM

So you were climbing outdoor stairs, filled with vertigo, terrified of falling. You were climbing higher and higher into the air, and the concrete had cracks here and there, and you were terrified that the whole structure would collapse. So there was a great tent in your yard, filled with children (the essence of creativity). So what?

And you reached a river. This river had great fat fish in it, and you thought you’d go fishing. But now there were two dying carp by the riverside, having been taken from the water and left there. Did you set them back into the water? Did you feel sorry for them? But look!—they had fled the water, for there was a great danger in the water, a danger worse than death. And look!—there were machines in the water, machines that threatened to put implants into the fish, and make them half-machine, no longer wild. Did you kill the fish then and there, knowing this was their wish?

Who gave you permission to be here? This is your sweet honey; this is your sweet bread; this is your sweet wine. You cannot take the weight of the world: it tortures you, and yet this is all due to your curious sin.

And so you have vertigo: you cannot stand to be up in the air. And yet your children will go higher and higher, they shall build a great tower which shall reach the heavens, and invade the heavens, and tear down the throne. This is because of your transgression: for you weren’t satisfied with being a lazy little monkey, and wanted to be like a god.

What is this strange substance and chatter at my ear? Here you are, weary with the weight of all that you carry: you have dropped a million bombs, killed a billion people, sent the earth into chaos, driven the beasts off into the far corners and remote places, created a nation of drones. We are all suffering terribly; we are all very sad; we take our lovely anesthesia; and we invent newer and newer anesthesia.

This is the food in your hand: stuff it in your stomach, and do not give a care as to how you will get more until you feel hunger. This is the cold of the night: huddle in a cave, and do not give a care as to where you will spend tomorrow night, or the night after that. This is your secret peace: you live with death, you sleep with death and make love to death: death sits in the next moment, always about to strike: yes, this is your secret peace.

But now you have enough food to last a lifetime. Now you are making plans for your shelter for your old age, and you are twenty years old! This is an abomination. Go out now: go out into the wide world and eat grass like an ox: shelter yourself with newspapers or a cardboard box: this would be better for you.

How can one live like a simple hermit in all this chaos you have created, O Adam? How can one remain shut up in the inner rooms and avoid being infected by the drones? How can one avoid being arrested, and thrown into the prisons, if one speaks out against all this mindless activity, this constant buying and selling, this constant working and spending? O sweet death, I live with you still: for the assassins are this very second on their way.

O Adam, let me tell you of a simple hermit who lives within the very heart of the hell you have created. What can he do to avoid the System’s great reaching arms, the System’s powerful hands, the System’s great network of souls bent upon his destruction? They are an army like one has never seen: their shields are like the sun reflecting off the ocean, a thousand crystals shimmering in the light; their weapons are magical and deadly (for this System makes magic, makes the impossible true). And if he does not comply with this System, he shall be thrown out onto the street, and eat from a beggar’s bowl. This simple hermit makes a study of the System, tries to comprehend the incomprehensible, tries to look for a weakness, an Achilles heel—and he finds no weakness, nothing which can to battle with such a beast—for who can fight it?—who can resist?—the prisons are full of those who resist, and the streets are choked with homeless wanderers who have tried.

You try to cross rivers at night; you try to sneak across borders and frontiers; you try to hide from the eyes all about you, the watchers, the things that do nothing but see. Everything all around you is made of eyes through and through, the world is made of eyes, this world does nothing but see and know, this world is a great standing watcher. You flee to the far corners of the earth, you try to stay hidden in the cities, you barricade yourself in the inner rooms—but the eyes are constantly there, taking in your image, recording your image—the eyes know all about you. Your sight is ugly, you have been made into a gray ugly thing, you are small as a mite, you are gray with lice and white worms. One day, little hermit, you shall call to Adam, the great father, and say, "Why? Why did you wish to be a god?"

And so, O Adam, you go on suffering your vertigo, you go on climbing the stairs. Why do you climb them if you are so afraid of heights? I know why: you are after your children, your wayward children, who go on building higher and higher towers, your children who are part-machine by now, your children who have diseased the face of the earth with brick and metal and light—you are chasing them, knowing they have been set into motion by your sin—and you cry, "Stop! For God’s sake stop!" But they go on climbing higher and higher—by now they work automatically, they cannot stop, they could not stop if they tried. Soon, the little bit of soul left in them shall be replaced by electric currents—you wanted to be a god, and you have made a race of soulless stones.