The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

will him into the foundation of our systems. After beating our heads against the desk struggling with present-day philosophers, we may come to understand her notion of pain as integral to the process of purification and, with the help of a debilitating headache, purge our minds of frame semantics. As matter impedes the activity of the soul, so does Alphabet-Reckoning obstruct dynamic thinking.

      Conway’s monist entity is almost adequate to explain the current state of pluralism—were this entity not so vital. To posit instead a trivialist principle: an entity that does not breathe life into the world, but sucks it away. One source of intense darkness is not enough to follow; we need a mediator to lead us. Between God and Creature, a middle nature communicates decay, malevolence, and arbitrariness: The Infernal Carpenter. Felling a forest to erect a city of shopping malls, he partakes of two extremes, blending the precision of God with the expediency of Creature—to this middle nature in the continuum of species there is no moderation. How can we not help being carried away by such a being? Looking more closely, we perceive that corporeal substances are not inert, only supremely sluggish. The cause of laziness is not just free will; our paralysis was built into the monads all along.

      Margaret Cavendish

      The most qualified spirit to write dying speeches for a blazing world of vanishing social types. To resurrect her, simply sacrifice the number of living souls equivalent in weight to her own; society will gain by this not only an arisen Cavendish, but the abolishment of feminist theorists. The world awaits the gender-progressive version of Aristophanes’s Frogs, in which an academic sisterhood marches into the underworld to bring back its early modern champion and is destroyed in the process. The plot: each feminist competes for the title of “Best Commentator on Cavendish’s Legacy” with a speech informed by post-structural theory, compiled by the duchess herself into Orations of Similar Sorts. But with none amidst this mental spinning of factious hearts understanding the importance of the ego, the most qualified vessel to embody her freed spirit is sought elsewhere. The twin values of selfishness and sovereignty are grasped by no living women philosophers—no, nor men either.

      ***

      An academic philosopher’s dying speech to future readers:

      “For those who learn in order to think automatically, and think automatically to sleep, and sleep to dream of better educational conditions: as there are three sorts of books—the popular, the poetical, and the drowsy—so are there three sorts of readers—the escapist, the word-addict, and the napper. Of these three sorts of books and readers, the drowsy and the napper are the best—and as an author of over thirty books and a thousand articles, I am proud to have drastically enlarged the numbers of this first category, even if the second has remained smaller than I feel I deserve. Though in my entire life I was never read by more than six peer reviewers, I am confident that you, Nobody, will remember me. It is true that my books are outdated now—indeed, before they even hit the shelves—and the style difficult to digest, and the terminology difficult to understand, and the concepts behind the terminology minute variations of the ideas of my peer reviewers; but this is our lot: we study to argue and argue to get paid. Nevertheless, I hope, like the medieval scholastics, to someday be appreciated by some discerning mind (wink wink) as one of the elite unknowns of intellectual history.”

      La Rochefoucauld

      Those who turn bitter from the world disappointing them have in fact been highly persevering in the face of reality. Not to wait for experience to implode lofty expectations, but to be bitter from the beginning—an a priori cynic—is the only way to escape the accusation of naïve idealism. Far from it being a contradiction for a pessimist in the abstract to be an idealist in the particulars, such double-mindedness, with its lack of expectation in the first case and lack of judgment in the second, effectively balances self-preservation with striving towards The Bad.

      Bayle

      Only a man who leads people to the ruins of Faith—a capital he himself razed—is qualified to rebuild it.

      Vauvenargues

      The restraint of a great soul maximizes his vices. His heart circumscribed, he lowers the standards of all around him, above all himself. He cannot sincerely console others for their lack of genius or chide for talent misplaced. His revs of passion are thinned and stretched into purrs expressed with slight movements of the head. His encouragement is gentle: “work diligently.” Praising him as a good man, they slack off when he turns his back. Modesty, not arousing fear, is incapable of fostering respect.

      Lichtenberg

      A single thought can often branch off in different directions, its followers stranding themselves in irreconcilable positions. An electrical tree of dead-end insights, this is the image gathered of one who sits down to write a treatise on human nature and ends up with a feuding family of observations. Such a person is not only a bad theorist, but a keen judge.

      Kierkegaard

      In comparison with his fragments, a literary thinker is like a man who sows a vast field with crops of every kind. In the end, this universal farmer ends up being the world’s most extravagant gardener. Grocers ask to explore the grounds, but they do not ask for a price. There is simply not enough of any one thing to buy in bulk. Intending to feed mouths, the cultivator of lyrical meditations succeeds only in drawing eyes.

      Emerson

      With Emerson, American philosophy began in grandeur. So will it end, everything in-between content without substance, as isolated in influence as in geography. In order for a work to be recognized as composed with matter in mind today it must be stripped of style, as plain-spoken as an aphasiac who grasps nothing but the facial expressions of his table mate.

      Americans have turned their back on the transcendental in favor of either the grounded or the extraterrestrial. The middle region doesn’t satisfy these days—nor did it then. Countervailing winds always blow a person up or down. Even those trying to bury their heads in cotton clouds only cough wisps of vapor.

      Wings and wetsuits are not in our armoire—no matter where life carries us we always bring skates. Unsuited to live anywhere but surfaces, heavenly voyagers skimming across a celestial sphere fall through a thin spot and drown in the quintessence. Under-Souls are distinguished by the way they keep looking forward, unmindful of chasms beneath their feet or the eternal One above them that threatens to particlize the dreams they are forever sighting ten feet ahead. If they would only chance to look up they might consider looking in—and find, in each case, only the conveniences of description.

      The essence of soul and universe is artifice.

      Is the universe natural? No. It had to be created, its secrets kept hidden from us until now—even now. There is nothing natural about nature—nor God. Before pantheism came consciousness, the profane spark. And a moral deity? That had to incubate in our cognitive categories for millennia. We created God so he could create the universe in turn, giving us night-lights to sleep by. Only after these inventions were we in a position to look inside and posit a lofty core behind the heartbeat. Descendentalism is the realization of this threefold fabrication: Source, slime, soul. We look out into a silent sea of the imagination, draw our decanter through it, and drink it down.

      The Good German

      Friedrich and Elisabeth—the Übermensch and the Imbecile, two polarities of Being spat from between the same legs, proof that humanity’s limitless possibilities are always in close proximity to insuperable barriers. Nietzsche may not have been Zarathustra, but he was the Madman: at the moment his genius left him he became his own literary prototype, an image his loyal sister augmented unwittingly. If only the tutorials in her brother’s concepts had been followed by a grasp of them, she might have given her nation the “good European” it so wanted, its four champions of secular Christianity:

      The artist who chains himself to his work with intent to allure—product of a slave aesthetics.

      The hallowed warrior who sees a fresh conquest in every new cause—perspectivist crusader.

      The philosopher who renounces life for the sake of conceptual variation—periodically-recurring martyr to