I had just committed the mind-crime and I was damned forever. Not just any mind-crime – the mind-crime. The ultimate mind-crime. Well, not really. I hadn’t actually done anything. I don’t actually know what the ultimate mind-crime would be or what it would entail. How you would go about committing it. Maybe there isn’t such a thing. Maybe there is. The point is that I was experimenting with what I thought it would feel like to know that you had committed the ultimate mind-crime and that you would as a consequence be damned forever. I was just pretending to myself that there was such a thing as the ultimate mind-crime and that I had just committed it. I couldn’t help myself you see – I was nosy about it. I wanted to know what that would be like. What it would feel like to be in that position, if there was one…
What would you call this? A sudden moment of perverse curiosity. A morbid fascination in a possibility so unspeakably horrific that most people would probably go through their entire lives without ever thinking of it. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you’d call it – what matters is that I gave in to the perverse impulse to imagine myself guilty of the ultimate mind-crime, the impulse to put myself in this most unenviable of positions. Not because I wanted to know just for the sake of knowing, but because I wanted to know how someone else would be feeling if they were in this situation and then be glad that it wasn’t me. I wanted to feel good about that. Not a very good motivation, you see. A bit screwed up. That’s the impulse I gave into. But what am I talking about? I didn’t ‘give in’ to it– I never had any choice. I could never have not given in to it. You don’t have a choice when an impulse like this comes along! This is what Edgar Allen Poe called ‘the imp of the perverse’ – can you imagine just sitting on this imp and not letting it out? You’d have to spend the rest of your life repressing it – it’d never go away. It’d drive you crazy. Pure crazy. Or maybe I’m just making excuses for myself. Trying to make myself feel better about what happened…
How could I feel better about what happened to me as a result of this unwise thought-experiment? You all know that thing about not pulling a horrible face in case the wind suddenly changes direction and you get stuck with it? Well that’s what happened to me. I imagined myself in that position and then I couldn’t unimagine it. I thought the thought and then having thought it I couldn’t unthink it. I couldn’t go back again to when I hadn’t had the thought – it stuck to me as if with superglue. I was like one of those small insects that happened to get stuck in the sticky sap oozing out of a wound in a pine tree. Once it touches you you can’t get free from it – you have no chance at all of getting free from it and then the next thing you know you’re entombed in it for millions of years. Instead of amber it was pure horror; I was frozen forever in the horror of that moment.
The mind-crime, the mind crime, the mind-crime. Why had I done it? Why had I committed it? How could I ever forgive myself for this? I know what you’re thinking – that I didn’t actually commit the mind-crime, that I had only imagined that I had committed it. That’s what I said myself only a moment ago, after all. I said that I didn’t even know if there was such a thing as ‘the ultimate mind-crime’. I had only imagined that there was such a thing and that I had committed it…
But you see, by thinking about it I had created it. By imagining it I had created it. Imagining that I had committed the mind-crime was the mind-crime that I could never forgive myself for committing. The ultimate mind-crime is imagining that you have committed the ultimate mind-crime. The mind-crime is to think about the mind-crime – that’s how bad it is. That’s how contaminating it is. The mind-crime is ultimately contaminating. That’s how contaminating it is to think about committing the mind crime. It’s the ultimately contaminating thought and I had just gone ahead like the worst most accursed fool in the world and thought it…
