We can adapt to such frighteningly petty lives, can we not? It’s an endless sequence, an arithmetical progression that leads us on inescapably to the pettiest of all petty worlds, only it’ll never reach its logical conclusion. That’s our curse, if we could but see it. It’ll never reach its logical conclusion because it’s a limitless sequence, a limitless progression. Only it’s not a progression at all, is it? It’s a regression. Silly me – I got it backwards. We have such a frightening facility for adapting to petty worlds, don’t we? So frightening – if only we could see it, but we can’t. We can’t see it because we are so well-adapted to the pettiness, to the downright small-mindedness of it all. we’re so phenomenally good at adapting, so very, very good, and that’s why we can’t see how terrifying it is – this thing that we doing without knowing that we are. This thing. This thing that we doing. What happens to all the fear and horror that we should be feeling and yet are not – that’s what I want to know? Where did it all go? It must go somewhere, after all. What underground engines does it drive, my friend – do you ever ask yourself that? What infernal mechanisms does it propel? This world of ours, huh? What could we say about it? It all looks so placid on the surface, this is pretty as a picture. The occasional bubble of swamp gas rising gloopily to the surface perhaps, releasing as it does so the foetid odours of the depths, but that’s all. You’d quickly forget about it. A moment of embarrassment at the dinner table, perhaps. It a momentary awkward silence, before some brave guest chirps up with a cheerful but impossibly inane comment about some frighteningly superficial topic. Life’s made up of frighteningly superficial topics, isn’t it? We leap with the greatest agility from one to the other like frogs hopping from lily pad to lily pad, trying our best to avoid the inevitable belches of toxic swamp gas as they get dislodged from the impenetrable depths of our lives. How do we do it, do you suppose? How do we do it. I’d be the first to confess that I’m not having a very good day. I’d own up to it in a flash, if you asked me. I’m safe in the knowledge that you never will, of course. Where will it all end, I wonder? Will it ever end? These religious fools with their pronouncements about the end of the world. Their pathetically self-important and humourless announcements. Can they not see that the true horror is to carry on as we are, everyone too afraid to say anything about it, but also too well adapted to the lies to know that they are afraid. They wouldn’t believe it if you told them. If you are afraid enough you’d believe any lie, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how banal. Did you ever think that? The Day of Reckoning is already here. It’s come and gone – we’re just in denial of it.