Hello, I've come before you today not to speak about something happy, or even something inspiring. But I feel that it is important to say, no perhaps that it is the most important thing of all. It's not happy though, because I don't know of any way we can achieve it, and time is running out.
You may have read Madeline L'Engle's works, A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind at the Door and such. The creature, no the force, no... the tendancy that was their enemy in that book was called It. It was the death of stars, and the fall of beauty and hope to uniform nothingness. But with a little magic and some powerful friends, the children in the book managed to turn It on its side, foiling it at every turn. Now here's the bad news I think I've figured out so far, is that It is a very real and pertinent thing in our world, but there doesn't seem to be any magic to save us from it.
Other examples of It have appeared in other fantasies, the Neverending Story's "Nothing," the sad little children on the Care Bears, in Flight of Dragons, Omadan's demons of havoc. Something that just seems to make things always end up a little less, a little worse than they were before.
Think of a tea cup though. Filled with hot tea up on the table. A slight push, and it falls, shattering on the ground and spilling tea and ceramic shards everywhere, steam goes into the air, and the liquid cools to room temperature. Now I ask you, how with a slight push can you get the steam and heat to return to the tea, the shards to reassemble themselves, and leap back up onto the table hale and whole? The fact remains that we live in a universe where things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there are actions that can never be undone. In this universe there is eternity, and that eternity is nothingness, loss of order and death.
I realize many people, most of you even, have a confident desire to live your life fully and end it happily, surrounded by loved ones, a satisfying end instead of a constant stream of one thing after another. But there are some of us who feel as if being finite is somehow a bad fit, that we might enjoy some form of immortality or at least agelessness. Both of us I think would agree that it would be the best if we could choose on some level when we're ready to pass away. That choice, unfortunately, does not seem to exist beyond a certain pre-programmed point. That bothers me.
I want to live continuously, changing as time changes, but never ceasing or becoming a discontinuity. I want to be a line instead of a line segment, instead of an apogee, a wave. I want to change in ways that are impossible, to become the most amazing creatures out there in the world and in our imaginations, without losing my self or my sanity. I want to call forth things, patterns and geometries in the air, potentials that with the shift of my attention can bring forth real effects. To seize the Sword of Flames and revel in its fire.
But none of these things are to be. You won't see me changing spontaneously into a 2 foot long relative of the weasel. You won't see the ward surrounding me stop a bullet aimed for my head. You won't see me at all a hundred years from now, because I will be dead forever as far as I've been able to find out. If I became a great scientist and improved the lives of millions, 200 years from now they would be thanking my name, but I wouldn't be able to hear them, see them, or even think about what I've done. If I became a brutal killer, echoes of my reign of terror might travel through the centuries, but I wouldn't be in any position to feel remorse, or to feel anything at all.
I've tried to find the answer though. I've tried to find what happens to the part of us that disappears when we die, where does our shape go? I've tried the halls of organized religion, but instead of God all I found were 2000 year old fish tales, and mass marketed propaganda powered by the wealthy elite. I've tried unorganized religion, but the people there are either like me, or they're like me but arrogant enough to think that they can equivocate away their problems. The curse didn't work, because it just wasn't the right time. The ritual circle didn't glow because it was a bad night for the alignment of the planets.
I've looked into the science of Physics, but all I find there are dead-ends, and starry eyed cosmologists who design experiments that can only be performed over billions of years in distant galaxies, fools perfectly content to waste their minds on things they will never be able to realize. I've looked for the answer in Mathematics, but that is nothing more than N-body problems, unsolveable equations, mysticism and ancestor worship. Tell me a general solution to any system of differential equations, and I'll give Math a higher consideration, but until then...
Physics, notably, has taught me a terrible story. A story of Thermodynamics and Entropy. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but I think I know enough to at least understand this: in our universe there are three laws: you can't win, you can't break even and you can't quit. These govern a concept known as Entropy, a quantity that increases for every action, and measures the amount of disorganization in the universe. The only reason life, with its entropy reversing processes, can exist at all is because for every child born, for every miraculous growth it's fed by the light of the sun, who is going through its nuclear fuel on a scale far greater than the order we bring from all the life on the planet. If Entropy describes a river moving steadily downhill, our planet, our world is nothing but a momentary eddy in that inevitable decline.
I would change all of that, but how? I know the question, I know what it is I want for all of us, but I don't know where to start. Every way I've tried to reverse the course of this river have ended in failure and frustration. Every rock I've overturned has revealed only more increases in universal Entropy, in general disorder. Tea cups fall, soap bubbles pop and people die, and none of those processes can be reversed without a loss somehow overall.
That's why I came before you today. I know nothing, I am humbled and beaten down by this doomed quest of mine. If you know anything, if you can find anything that would decrease the Entropy of a closed system, anything that would bring magic back into the world, anything that would turn that which we know, that which we know as inevitable, on its end, leaving us with new grounds to forge... if you can find hope, any hope, please let me know. I need hope so bad it's killing me faster than even if I normally died.
That's why I'm looking for my box. Pandora's box, once opened released mysterious and powerful demons of all sorts, blamed for our vices and sins, regarded as bad and evil, but you know what I think? I think someone caught all the demons and stuffed them back into the box. That's why the world is so unbalanced as it is: there's nothing to shake things up, no unexpected occurrences, nothing we can't explain! And even if these monsters trapped in that box were truly evil, there is something else in that box whose power is greater than all of them combined, and that something is Hope. I use the box as a symbol for what my ultimate goal is: to bring hope back to the universe, to take away these strange and alien limits that don't make sense, limited lifespans, budgets, happiness, and freedom.
Why can't we travel to the stars? Portal through other dimensions? Why can't I moonlight as a raccoon every other Friday? If I could open my box, whatever it is, wherever it is, all that could occur. But I don't know where to start, and that's why I need your help. Please help me... and thank you for listening.
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