Remembering Nihilism

Picture this - it is fin de siecle, the end of the century, the end of the 19th century. You are coming home from your gentleman's club where you have sipped some cognac from the time Napoleon was scaring the European world with his diminutive posture like some little giant on steroids and everybody was shitting their pants from the Tzar to the Prussian chancellor and the Austrian Kaiser. You have revelled all night in pedantic talk about East Indian Company stocks and the investments one must make in Belgian rubber from the Congo, when all of a sudden all the ash from your smoked cigars comes surging up your lungs and jolts your sedated brain into a strange new posture also known as cognitive thought.

What do I care, you will say, one must expect these things. One will go home and take a sip of the coca wine you and your God loving, excess hating party have banned last week without understanding why. Of course, one such as you can partake because you are above everyone else, and then again, you do not rejoice in excess. You are a very good hypocrite.

Back in your drawing room, the servants, evansecent under the gas light, disappear in the domestic twilight whilst you sip your coca wine, open the Evening Standard and drowse heavily over the ink stained pages smelling of industiral lead.

You remember the thugee rebellion that happened such a long time ago, you remember the soma eaters that take you back to Homer and your ancient European world, your heavy browed school masters and you think to yourself, it is such a wonderful civilisation we live in.

But it is you now, and not Ulysses, that is in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. The time and continent of Stoker`s vampires, one step closer to the Frankenstein monster and an eternity away from the Parthenon in Athens.

And suddenly and out of nowhere you begin asking yourself why? and you find out that there is no answer in you semi-educated mind to tackle that question. You are very rich, probably a little ovewieght, unmarried and what your Eton pairs might tag as a bit of an eccentric. But what exactly you have become you exactly cannot even begin to say.

You start to feel that there is a bit more to life than the European way of living it, hiding behind your unjust and civilised society as if you were putting on a gas mask to steer clear of reality. You are quizzical about things, at 3 am, on a Monday night, somewhere around London's suburbs where Shaliapin is streaming from the gramaphones and underaged street urchins are shovelling horse manure for a shilling at 10 pounds; and for the first time in your well groomed existence you discover life is unjust.

With your mind plunged into the European night you feel it is the time of Walpurgis Nacht, when heirs to the throne are having anal intercourse with the chamber maid and bankers decide the going rate of life depending on the rubber that flows out of primeval forrests somewhere below the Equator. It is your awakening, your personal Apocalypse, your self-made revelation and you are lost in the dead of night, when all the servants are all asleep.

So what now, what now, in the dead of night? Ravaging through your superfluos library you do not turn to the Bible, the Bible did not speak of indusrty, just of big towers that were stabbing at the sky. So you turn to the philosophers but not the Greeks, they did not have pollution, not the Roman historians nor the agnostics from the Middle East. You select a volume with uncut pages of an in vogue German philosopher whose name everyone misspells. It is a copy of So spake Zarathustra, an allegory written by a man so wise he turned the world upside down and started rattling until change came streaming out of its pockets and insanity started seeping out of its head. It is Nietzsche, a man that roamed Karlsbaden naked and drunk screaming onto passers by - I am Dionyssos, bow to me! - a German of all things who found debauchery before any other European, and turned debauchery into consciousness.

What a dark new age you have just awoken to and you haven't even read all the book. At 10 am you remember to move slighlty to your left and get that numb feeling out of your body. It`s alrgiht. While your body went numb, your mind started to wander. You hear youself enunciate - nothing is worh anything anymore.

You start downing sheerys at 12 am and the servants are gasping for air not knowing what to do with master, who seems to have blown a gasket. You get undressed in a haze and in your intimates you pace the manor with the .12 gauge shotgun you used to down ducks with, massaging the cartridges with your moist hand, discovering the possibilities of suicide. And there seem to be many possibilities in suicide as time passes by. You black out.

You awake in a daze. You are at the opera, appreciating Wagner and you think it was only a dream. A smartly dressed gentleman gives a witty remark at the dinner party after the show and you slap him, get up, bid everyone a good night and go home, on foot, sit in your armchair with a loaded shotgun, reading Nietzsche while Shaliapin is roaring his Mephisto out of your exhausted gramaphone. You are naked and you start discovering you are a god.

Bored but born anew, because you have discovered the essence of life - happy insanity.