Thorns of Immortality
by Patryk Rebisz


Part I (short excerpts) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

7. Slavery Of Any Dying Dog
"Despite conviction that he's made the right choice, the Poet was also afraid of what might await him on the other side. Death didn't terrify him: you are alive and then you are not. This progression of events was natural not only to animals and humans but even to planets, stars, galaxies and most likely even time itself."

"The closeness of death made the natural event of the end more apparent. Humanity is continuously marching towards the edge of the abyss, but people only cared about the end if faced with its immediacy. People live with knowledge of the beginning and the end but as long as this knowledge is kept away from their conscious psyche - they feel comfortable in the delusion of non-mortality."

"Is it even possible to truly imagine death? Can one ever overcome their 'beingness'? Aware of time's existence, people become terrified. The mind, that can subvert time by flying towards conceptual infinities, succumbs to its ruthless submission to the body. With its death, the mind's exploration of the infinities is over."

"People go about the day looking toward the Sun unconcerned about its fate as it sets in the evening forgetting that the very energy that gives planets their life, makes the Sun come closer to its own destruction."

"A pleasant vacation to some tropical island that lasts two weeks differs from that which lasts two years. Those timestamps change perception: the immediacy of return to daily normalcy in one case; in another, the prison of paradise."

"Tomorrow at this hour the Poet will be no more - either asleep for centuries or dead - erased from the immediate existence of now."

"Without self-awareness, there is no conscious change - beings live out their time, unaware how their actions adjust spiritual molecules of the universe. To have soul is to be aware how one's actions change the universe through that contact with the sublime substance."

"Many people are not fully human as despite the possibility of them affecting the universe through their awareness, they remain oblivious of that prospect, changing nothing. Through the ignorance of their own power, they willingly stay impotent forever."

"Only 'humans' with self awareness complex enough to comprehend their own value to the universe deserve that label. The implications of classifying some people into non-human category frightened the Poet. He looked around at the people in the train - how many of those surrounding him would fail the test… Would he pass it?"