‘Is it right,’ you ask, ‘is it right we should be obliged to honour and respect every idiot that comes along, and tell them exactly what they want to hear?’ ‘Yes,’ they reply solemnly, ‘it is right. It is right and fitting. You mustn’t ever tell them anything else…’
The devil always comes armed, you see. He comes armed with a million meaningless sentences – a million meaningless sentences just like this one. He will snare you with them. He’ll snare you good and proper.
We love to talk about the unreal things, do we not? We love to expound broadly upon them, we can expound about the unreal things until the cows come home. ‘Let’s have a good old chat’, we say, rubbing our hands together with glee, ‘let’s have a good old chat about those wonderful unreal things…’
Happy times, my friends – happy, happy times. Splendidly happy times. Talking about the unreal things. Rejoicing in the unreal things. Luxuriating in them. Creating a whole world out of them, creating an extraordinarily splendid and vibrant culture for ourselves, a culture that is based entirely on unreal things. Clapping ourselves heartily on the back for being so clever. For being the smart fellows that we are. Milking it for all we can.
The power had been handed over to me – the power to bring life to inanimate matter, the power to create universes out of mere nothingness. The power to speak the special words. It had been handed to me a long, long ago but I had abused it. In my terrible rashness I had created the Disney Planet and now I was forever cursed. Thus it was that I became the ultimate criminal – hunted across the length and breadth of ten thousand galaxies….
Once you create the Disney Planet then you can never uncreate it, you see. You’re stuck with the consequences of your action and that’s the long and the short of it. No matter what you do, no matter what thrilling and exciting stuff you get up to, you’ll keep on remembering what you did and that will bring you back. It will bring you back to reality in a very rude fashion. That knowledge will come into your head and it will bring you back to reality with a nasty bump. You will remember – even at the best of times, even at the most exciting of times – that you were responsible for creating the filthy unspeakable Garbage Universe, and you will be consumed with shame. You’ll be eaten up with horror at what you had done. ‘Why did it have to be you that did it?’ you wonder.
You did the bad thing, you see. You did the bad thing, and you’ll never get away from that. There is no getting away from that – there just isn’t. Not ever. ‘Why did I do it?’ you’ll ask yourself, ‘what on earth was I thinking of?’ You want to go back in time to fix it, to make it so it never happened, but that’s the one thing you can’t do. You want to tell everyone that you didn’t mean it but nobody cares. Nobody cares what you meant – they just want to see you pay.
You are creating new universes by the dozen. It seems that you can’t do anything without creating new universes – you are spawning them incessantly, whether you mean to or not. You are spawning them left, right and centre. You are the Great Spawner, you are the fabled Spawner of Universes… Only they aren’t really ‘universes’ as such, are they? They’re just echoes of the Original Error – the Error you made and can’t ever correct…
