The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

the seven deadly sins as a test of resilience.

      Ascetic when young, hedonist when old. —How much perplexity and grudging respect would be due such a person! And when the change comes, how much disappointment from those familiar with the original self. But can one blame him? It was not that he was making up for lost time; he had already saved it by preempting folly in his youth. In the end he dispensed with the wisdom he no longer needed—upon reaching a certain age he found that no one was paying attention to it. By shifting strategies grandpa became fun, someone the new generation could appreciate.

      But after all this, ascetic and hedonist alike share the common value of uncoming. Each way represents an art of life, two roads leading unto one destruction, converging stylizations of the inevitable.

      In certain periods one method predominates—to the forced inclusion of the other. In an epicurean society every act of denial which the lonely Stoic practices is mistaken for the nausea after the binge, every illustration of asceticism the fasting before the feast. Not seeing the whole of his life (for that he would really be shunned), observers see a slice of it and take it as an indication of the sickness surrounding excess. They accord him the respect of a master indulger, wishing they could someday be as experienced as him, eager to surpass his record of debauchery. At the same time they urge more indulgences upon him, pleading with him not to rest now when he is so close to that final indulgence that would enter his name into the hall of fame. It takes a man of mighty resolution to resist peer pressure . . . but what Stoic has ever not thrived on the public respect for his lifestyle, and has not hesitated to give it up when the tenor of the times calls for this final relinquishment? And so, surrounded by outstretched arms weighed down by fistfuls of spices and fruits, the Stoic embraces the colic that follows from eating after prolonged starvation. He undertakes this submission as his last victory over hedonism, and he has good reason to be proud: he did not want his accepted donations.

      Sexually Transmitted Congruence

      Goat bladder—Minos’s bedroom Minotaur.

      Queen Anne’s lace—Hippocrates’s hemlock.

      Pennyroyal tea—Dioscorides’s organ failure.

      Pepper—Pope John XXI’s damnation.

      Lemon rind—Casanova’s withdrawal from life into autobiography.

      Cotton root bark—the Confederacy’s domestic war.

      Diaphragm—veil of America’s second Gilded Age.

      ***

      Sexual evolution has a new yardstick for efficiency. It no longer needs to rely on a society’s contraceptive methods to choreograph the dance between love and death. The spread of the HIV virus has finally harmonized Freud’s conflict of Eros and Thanatos. By not restricting itself to socially acceptable outlets, precisely by raging to satisfy itself, the erotic instinct undermines its own will to preservation and acknowledges itself as part of the same being as death. Love appropriates immune system failure into its bosom, purifying Eros into Venus, freeing its swooners of any mundane justification of oath-keeping and family duty. With civilization as judge and biology executioner, those unwilling to submit to monogamy are only too happy to mercilessly punish themselves with pleasure. In the name of conscience, life allows its aggressiveness to express itself unchecked against the promiscuous population as organisms bounce towards their end in a horizontal limbo. Then, at the height of gratification, Venus turns the lovers into daisies and flies away. Those who survive are without guilt over their sexual frustration, bolstering the status quo in a confused earthly approximation of Nirvana—the civil union.

      Mirth’s Profession

      Clowns entered the world laughing only to cry at the punch line of every joke not at their expense. They squeeze tiny feet into oversized shoes, hoping someone will step on them for the sake of being noticed; they wear a musical nose to attract fist notes as accompaniment to their sinus infection. That they are the saddest creatures in the world is a cliché; less well-known is that self-deprecation delights them in a world where everyone is taught respect.

      Two Ways to Classify Common Sense

      a) Internalizing the spirit of the age. Represented today by the man of economic self-reliance who watches team sports and possesses a sincere, feeble, and unconvincing sanguinity.

      b) Perceiving the world as it enters the sense organs, packaged without bubble-wrap for return shipment. Possessed by few. Praised by none.

      In each case interpretation is at a minimum. To the dreamy outsider, the laziness of the first group and the minimalist will of the second appear equally boorish, grounded as they are: the difference between fraternizer and realist is a choice between ant and beetle. The dreamer forgets that as a butterfly he was once a caterpillar and, on all but his best days, is still a chrysalis.

      Elixirs of Flight

      Work, politics, education, marriage and family life, church—the traditional institutions have ceased to provide fulfillment to its citizenry. Mother’s milk has turned to powdered formula, and after choking down our nutrition we suckle on tart tonics to wash the taste from our mouths. We soil ourselves with small pleasures, reimbursing our libidos with the time and effort sapped from the old ways. Carnage, erotica, exotica, fun-physic: in a time of tradition when leisure was not yet vocation’s stocking stuffer these things were no siesta helpmeets, but formed the bedrock of adventure. The knight errant, the buccaneer, the Casanova—before becoming the bromides of a drunken scriptwriter, such lovers of the blood were coagulations of reality into legend. Until the nineteenth century it was still possible for a man to be his own parable. But what was once a style of life has become proof of life—or if seen from without, a measure of likelihood. A vicarious experience is the only evidence of oxygen intake to the mouth breather. But to the voyeur of this spectator it is a sign of vegetation, the aerobics of comfort. As for one who despises the little things of life, who tires of rote stimulation and seeks vast pleasures—he is forced to live dangerously in a new way: through work, politics, education . . .

      The Disciple

      The teacher’s ideas crawling through his head, he got the nurse to check it for lice, but he found that being prodded with sticks was little better than getting beaten with one. That was enough to cure him of both learning and annual checkups. Having discarded two types of exams, the mental and the physical, only his therapist was left to give him discomfort. Making weekly appointments to blunt his emotions, he prepared for his inkblot tests by making hand shadow puppets in a free-association sequence. His passions being all he had left, he was forced to regularly guard himself from them.

      Love’s Secrecy

      To dare not tell; beyond this, the moment our partial nature is even implied, wholeness eludes us. A sad fate, as the truest love is a desperate love. Nonchalance only ever leads to an adjacency of two halves—a pie bisected before panning.

      Eighth Heaven

      We do not gradually ascend a train of thought from its sea-level beginning to its cloud-conclusion of inspiration, but dash there eagerly, overleaping any drops and creaky steps in-between. Paths of reasoning are outlines for flights of fancy. The stairway to heaven is too slow, too winding with the subtle and ambiguous; we require an elevator that lifts us to our biases without the effort of justification. Eventually a malfunction finds us trapped in the dark, mimicking the very pit we were trying to avoid all along. Only here, there is no privacy.

      Ride to the Ophthalmologist

      Optimist: It is on the slow ride that the heart beats fastest.

      Realist: We would’ve snuggled on the Ferris wheel, it’s true—but only the rollercoaster could have made me scream.

      Pessimist: Yes, we most wish to love those who bore us.

      Idealist: Then why not live the excitement of your dreams?

      Pragmatist: Fine, just don’t fall off the Ferris wheel in your simulated swoon—wear a seat belt!

      Metaphysician: What for, when the fall would be such a short descent