The Nun of Hell
|
Then you get through a door that shuts right behind you.
Darkness now floods the place you got to. Suddenly overwhelmed with panic you rush at the door so you can leave, but it has disappeared, just like anything wall-like. The knob that you expected to grab moved 10,000 yards away. There you run round in circles, holding your arms up in front of you. You try to reach the limits of this space. But you may just as well gallop at the bottom of the sea. Inert though pacing up and down, you tread upon nothing... Your feet have no grip on anything whatsoever and wade through emptiness. You lose all senses : your body space, then your body itself are no more than thinking and memory. Thus, alone and lost in the middle of nowhere, you ponder that everything might just be an illusion, a deception of the senses : you do not even feel your eyes blinking. Open or shut – you no longer know. The thousands of tiny red and blue stars have disappeared from before the gaping space of your pupils. And that is what you really are now : a black and empty pupil that has got no more light to prism on any retina. |
 |
Thus everything has been swept clean. There is nothing but thought... First you conjecture the malicious and deceiver spirit whom no one – not even you – could be fooled without. Then, it is so obvious : as there is thought, therefore there is being. But smarter than Descartes, you do not skip from "it thinks" to "I think" ; your doubt is more radical than his and so you avoid the impasse of the subject and methodological individualism. Then, without intending it, a miracle happens. It comes upon you like a grace : a faint light dots the indistinct emptiness. A pale and weak spot of light with nowhere to catch and reflect on. Your consciousness is getting closer ; it is far away, but it lets you get nearer on the course of a journey that may last for centuries although time means absolutely nothing. |
|
In a split second,
your empty mind and your doubt without a purpose fill up with one but immense and firm certainty : the Nun of Hell exists ;
alone among chaos she holds a candle. It is an amazing wonder : doubt is no longer allowed ; the world is there, waiting for us to take over. A brand new freedom that every man must take to improve life.
|
|||
 |
What a lesson ! It makes you feel so alive. You have faith in the progress of humanity... You will use your goatskin as a sail to cruise on this route ! |  |
|
|
|
|||
|
You have cultivated a deep pessimism for quite a while. You have your doubts about men being able to improve, even slightly. You give up your goatskin and put on a mantle more suited to your misanthropy. In one pocket there is a red piece of wax. | ||
 |
 |
 |
|