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(It isn't so often that I borrow someone else's title, but when fate thrusts something so appropriate into your hands you are a fool not to see it for what it is. The following essay was found in the back pages of a used copy of The Poetic Translations of the Books Of Terror and Longing. I kept it, because it felt right, and things fell into place from there. The author is anonymous.)
When a historian looks back, what he sees is Death. It is everywhere, the universal constant informing every act. Only the Historian is aware of how we are blind to the amount of history pushing into our backs - blind to time and our place in it. We are ignorant of history and ignorant of Death, and only the Historian sees it for what it is. Antiochus was, in this sense, nothing if not a Historian. As he says in the Messages:
"When we become known to Death, and Death known to us, we react as if we are the first; as if we were Adam in the Garden, and death a great injustice, a surprise. But this death matters very little. In truth, it matters not at all, for it is just one more body in a pile. Who are we to shed a single tear over one more dead soul when it is is simply another in the unceasing parade of death down our streets, in our fields, in our homes? Why are we surprised when we join it's dancing flood?"
That passage sounds harsh to modern ears, but it perfectly describes the paradoxes of the Historian's trade. As an example: the years 1348 to 1350 were not good ones for human kind. A wave of infectious diseases, varied but overshadowed by the bubonic plague, swept across the globe, killing indiscriminately. Typhus, Influenza, and Small Pox were all prevalent. In just two years the population of Europe was cut by a quarter. The Town of Toulouse was home to 30,000 souls in 1335 and only 8000 a century later. 1,400 people died in just three days in Avignon, the seat of the papacy. There was, officially, nowhere to hide. Not a single one of those dead mean, women, children, fathers, mothers, lovers, or friends knew that their death was simply one part of the greatest culling of the human race ever known, a simple mark in the "ones" column for the greatest disaster in history. Death has a belt, and he notches it just once, no matter who you are. Not one of those people appreciated the big picture, the great number, over the extinguishing of their life, their loves, their woes and memories and happinesses. Not one of them saw it for what it was. They only saw the sores on their limbs, the milky white in their eyes, the blood in their spit and urine.
Knowing that an individual death is meaningless - any individual death, especially your own - that you are not a person, but a statistic - and noticing, more each day, the countless deaths that occur around you - of other people, of animals, of insects, of the sick and infirm, of accident victims, of plants ripped from the earth and worms crushed beneath the blades of plows - of authors in their rooms, scribbling out desperate words in the backs of books no one will ever read- even the shattering of molecular bonds, the disintegration of atomic structures, happening in every moment, millions in each nanosecond, everywhere -
- This is Deathconsciousness -
And It begs the question - "What is the point?"