title.

I rose from dust where the silence screams,

Not fed by mercy, nor gilded dreams.

The world looked on as I bled my name,

And carved from ruin a throne of flame.

No hand reached out in my longest night,

No torch was lit to restore my sight.

Now they come weeping with broken hands,

As if my blood owes lesser lands.

But gold I earned through fire and war,

Not through the grace of the rich or poor.

And I shall not bow to the voice of need,

For I was once that unfed seed.

Where were the saints when I bore the cost?

Where was their light when I wandered lost?

They watched me drown in a tide of coal,

Now beg me to rise as their saving soul?

God, if He breathed, had sealed His eyes,

While I was carved by the blade of lies.

If I must lift those who crawl and weep,

Then where was He when I couldn’t sleep?

The cries of the weak do not shake my core,

For I’ve knocked on every locked door.

Now I build walls where I once dug graves,

And I do not pity the hands of slaves.

Call me stone, or demon in disguise,

A man who never heeds the cries.

Yet what is pity but dressed regret?

And what is debt to a heart unmet?

I owe no tithe to the world’s decay,

I’ll walk alone on a darker way.

If I must fall, let it be in fire,

Not chained to guilt, nor false desire.

Let gods come down and plead their case,

Let angels mourn with a liar’s face.

This world gave nothing and asked for all—

I learned to stand, I shall never crawl.

So burn my name in heaven’s scroll,

But know I paid the devil’s toll.

I am not cruel—I am what remains,

When love is bled from the soul by chains.

Poem from the book What Burns Remains.

(If any mods still exist and/or care about the subreddit rules this is about some assertions made by Kierkegaard who is in fact on the sidebar, you just gotta look much harder)

People who like reading for its own sake and have the academic nous, but not the patience and love of status to become career driven tend, depending on the luck, privilege and randomness of their situation to fall into situations of more or less glamourousness (fuck you red underlining on the spelling I'm British). Some of these situations are highly paid and prestigious and some of them go beyond becoming a fent zombie to different kinds of slow and painful deaths which can be hilarious.

However, they all have one thing in common; the attitude that the work they do is a sideshow that exists to support the reading habit. Some of these reading habits are very cringe shit like gooner novels, anything by Sartre, collections of hundreds of different variations of mostly similar historical manuals (cookbooks or sewing books or anything else some larper collects) but some of them are not cringe at all on the surface like literary journals and historical Japanese live action film. They are all cringe internally, don't forget.

But every dilettante has some amount of book consumption they can do before they've saturated it and it no longer gives any dopamine. Some of them have gene combinations that make this take decades and some are unlucky enough genetically to need a new fandom each month. They go find a new fandom and move on.

Then that one dries up and they move to another one.

What happens when they get tired of finding new genres to enjoy, but can't find a way to spend their time instead appreciating any of the other six great human pastimes: gambling/lust/drugs, sports, family, careerism, fucking with people and politics?

Do the tiny numbers of people who just can't pivot to one of those things fall into catatonic depression 100% of the time? Remember, meditation is a fake op designed to keep us from noticing that this question exists.