Welcome to the Island of Wisdom!
Learned people cast great shadows.
There were once great people here,but now there is something even greater.
Even though the roof is long gone,the pillars still seem to retain purpose.
Every learned person would write a memoir in their final years of life.
We mourn not the dead, but the knowledge that left the world with them.
At the beginning of time, all the sausages were joined together in a never-endings chain. For festivals, people from cities around brought food to cook on the sacred, giant fires of this city. Not all the celebrations here could keep fate at bay.
The wise people all felt the approach of an inevitable death, not just of body, but of idea. People understood that their world was not merely dommed - it was already gone. They began to live as if, not even in the memories of their children, but in the findings of future scholars.
The means by which fate struck them, however, surprised them, as the ground they stood on began to give way. People cut down all their trees in an effort to build a great scaffold to escape the rising tides. By the time the fountains were let run dry, people here had already lost hope in ever controlling the waters. They used to come to the bathhouse to escape the sun, but by the end they were drowning their criminals there. They tore at their hair with frustration, and rolled around on the ground. They drowned men and women puffed and bloated until they looked like sausages.
All trees gone, all creatures gone, people hoped merely for a week without calamity so they could dry, cook, and eat their dead. The only anxiety one could have was of being the last person to die, what a waste of food with no one arould to eat it!
Memories of mass feasts became premonitions of funeral rites. Children beheld the jellied oozings of their parents, and an ocean of eyes. Cooking isn't a sacrifice from the living to the dead - it's a gift from the dead to the living. When everyone dies, one by one, who buries the last body? Human responsibility remains. Even after so much time had passed, the bodies still called out for reparation. A ghost isn't a dead person with unfinished business - it is a living person carring the weight of the dead.
People dreamd that in the future, somebody would come and lay them all to rest. People dreamed that their wishes had meaning. People dreamed that they were already dead. Not just people were dreaming, but the world itself was now dreaming. People dreamed that their world was not already dead. The dreams were already just a dream. In dreams there is hope.
All their dreams unburdened now, it's time for the world to wake.