A Comfortable Journey

From the travel diary of a visitor in the realm of the last man:

But I always think of these moments of decision as being like a long, winding slide. Everyone enjoys a slide, so you gladly wait your turn, propped up by the familiar faces and encouraging words of those already in line, until you get your chance to sit at the top of the structure, legs draped down the slope, and pull yourself forward, perhaps assisted by a friendly push from your fellows. For a while you appreciate the almost exhilirating freedom of gliding along without a care. How easy it is to move with so little resistance, to feel one’s body drawn along by gravity and the smooth surface. Eventually, however, you begin to sense that the descent is going on too long, becoming tedious and predictable, and you would like to get off. Here you reconsider that feeling of freedom that you experienced at the start, in light of the growing awareness that, as you now reflect on it, you are not free at all. The freedom was an illusion, the whole ride is compulsory, for the side rails determine your path and the slide’s momentum prevents you from stopping or escaping. With increasing discomfort, a certain anxiety, eventually even perhaps a hint of dread, you realize that you have no control over the direction you are travelling, and that the final destination, approaching up ahead, as always (“Why didn’t I see this coming?”), is a wide, sandy pit of collective humanity, with a large sign over it: “Welcome to Normal.” As you get nearer to this sandy pit, you can see the faces of some of the people who had made you think this trip to Normal might not be so unpleasant — and yet their faces look distorted now, their voices sound different, and the comforting familiarity that encouraged you to sit down at the top of that slide with a vaguely anticipatory smile has begun to feel more like an all-too-familiar trap.

Henceforth, to the extent that I can, I shall try to remain aloof in these situations, even during the “fun parts,” and not to fool myself into forgetting — AtÄ“ with her delicate feet tiptoes on the heads of men, Homer writes — that the intended destination of this slide, the ultimate reason the slide exists at all, is a place that I did not choose, and that I would never choose.


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