Van Auken | Egotist's Club

It’s been two months now that I’ve been talking to myself in the Club. This is a lonely state of affairs, but at least we have good port, yes?

Not that it matters, as I have left the Cockburn ‘96 untouched. Though the bottles have settled again, that’s the sort of thing I’m unlikely to consume by myself.

Always drink in celebration, never in consolation; and if you must drink in consolation, never drink alone.

I can only assume that my sister muses are all busily engaged elsewhere, or that the Prince of Stories has stayed far from them and thus they are uninspired.

Perhaps I should tell of stories I’ve read lately, but I tell you what: I picked up A Severe Mercy to reread it, and threw it down in frustration because I’m so irritated at how much delight Sheldon and Jean shared. I picked up Gaudy Night, and though I love the writing, the storyline, and the honest exploration of what constitutes a woman’s work, rereading it tore at my heart just as much. At present I’m working my way through That Hideous Strength for the third or fourth time. I’m not convinced that its denouement will distress me any less, but at least the book prompts more general thoughts and questions about the role of science in society and the role of man in the universe.

One of the most ghoulish images in it is the bodiless face: a bit of skin, a horrible flap of mouth, a drooling tongue, carefully preserved by dials and tubes and various climate controls. It is able, through the worst sort of manipulation, to speak, but none of us would regard it as alive. It is not viable, not an entity on its own, unable to wipe the saliva from its lips.

Pausing in my reading and pondering this sad facsimile of a Head brought to mind a question posed to my Philosophy 101 class, years ago when I was a Hillsdale freshman. “Say that you could be hooked up to a machine that would provide you intense, unceasing pleasure, for as long as you wanted it. Your body’s physical needs for nutrition etc. would be taken care of. Would you opt in?” We all declined (with the possible exception of the class smart aleck; I can’t recall), stating that our lives were meant for more, yes, even if it involves suffering, that we wanted to accomplish things, that surely there is a difference between manipulation of the brain and the real deep delight of taking some sort of action and reaching some kind of result. Our various arguments – some more reasonable, others more emotional in nature – all denied the humanity of a being attached to a dopamine dispenser. We declared that such an existence, no matter how pleasurable, did not suit the dignity of a man.

All of which is to say that my freshman-year self is standing in judgment of my present-day self, since my present-day self has spent huge chunks of time – embarrassingly long chunks of time, really – reading and reading and reading fanfiction online. “That’s not so bad,” you say. “Fan-written stories? Surely you’d get impatient with them if they were rubbish.”

Sadly, I don’t. I click ever more furiously. I go for the hit. I keep clicking. It is everything I admitted in my Obsession Confession Session, if not worse. The Twitter account @VeryShortStory summed it up well: I fed the King another story for his pleasure. It was his opium. He lived in my words, while outside, his defeated kingdom crumbled.