Topical Guide 116
Mark Dorset
Fragility, Vulnerability
THE COPY OF The Amazing Randy the Unbreakable Record that Matthew gave me was badly worn. Matthew must have played it often. I had to strain to hear Randy through the hissing and popping on the first side. The second side was marked with deep gouges that looked to me as if they had been deliberately made, perhaps with the point of a compass. I couldn’t play that side at all.
Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”
Euthanasia
When I had recovered from the chicken pox and was allowed to go outside, I smashed Randy with a brick and buried him in the back yard. It seemed the decent thing to do.
Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”
Immortality
I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. … To me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe—such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible—and eternal, so that come what may to my “Soul,” my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part—I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me—but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.
Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion (Bruce Frederick Cummings), The Journal of a Disappointed Man
[more to come on Monday, October 25, 2021]
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