“There is nothing to do and no one to do it”, said the voice in my head cheerfully, but somehow the gist of that little bit of wisdom was lost on me. I got up to leave, ill at ease and unwilling to pursue the matter any further. “There’s nowhere to go and no one to go there”, the voice in my head chipped in immediately, without missing a beat. I sat bolt upright in the bed, the sweat running down my face. For a long moment I didn’t know where I was – my heart was beating loudly, my mouth painfully dry. I tried to go back over things in my head, to put everything in its place. “This belongs here and that belongs there” I said to myself, with whatever authority I was able to muster. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” says I, trying to impose some kind of order back on the world. “This is one of them and this is one of those,” I said. Everything has its right place. To be sure it does. For a long moment I didn’t know who I was. It was a very long moment. It was the longest moment I had ever known. It was a forever moment. It was the fifth second of forever. Let me just go back over this I said to myself. Put everything in perspective. Work out who I was where I was and what I was doing there. Or that kind of stuff. Get a bit of a narrative going. A bit of a jolly old narrative can’t do any harm, after all. And perhaps a narrator to narrate it? Put a bit of an order on things. My heart was beating faster than ever now and my mouth – it occurred to me – was the driest thing in the whole wide world. I had never realized that it was possible for a mouth to be so dry. I made a Titanic effort to swallow but all that happened is that my throat stuck together. My throat adhered to itself in the most unpleasant way imaginable and I could hear the blood running through the capillaries in my brain. I sat bolt upright in bed, my face wet with sweat and my heart pounding in my chest. For a moment, I couldn’t remember who I was. It was a forever moment – the longest moment of my life. It had no duration. Tt had no beginning and no end. “There’s nothing to do and no one to do it”, said the voice in my head amiably. I got up to leave, uneasy with the way things were going. ‘Easy is the descent to Avernus, says Virgil. How right he was. How very rightful stop easy is the dissent. Easy is the descent. It’s so easy he wouldn’t even notice it happening! You wouldn’t notice a thing. You drift onto that Bad Old Road – the road that leads to Avernus – and you never notice yourself doing it. Your legs are walking all by themselves. Just as if you’re a sleepwalker or something. What am I my saying? You ARE a sleepwalker – that’s the whole point. You’re a fully paid-up somnambulist; you’re a member of the union. You’re an accredited member. Of the Royal Guild of Somnambulists. You’re sleepwalking but you don’t know it. It’s the easiest journey in the world. ‘Bang!’ and you’re there. You’re there before you know it. You just never paid any heed, not until it was too late. You took your eye off the ball and now look what happened…
Image credit – tribality.com