Cynical thoughts for your useless day

French writer Houllebecq takes weltschmerz to its schmerziest, shittiest, world-sickest extreme. He's beyond cynicism. His despair is so weary, it does and doesn't have the courage of its own darkness. There's a challenging utterness about it. It says without reservation: drown, drown, in your own irrelevance, you nothingness of so-called humanity. One big sneer at everything, including itself. Read this (he's actually writing about the writer Lovecraft). I love it; it leaves no punch unpulled.

"The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure 'Victorian fictions.' All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant.

Of course, life has no meaning. But neither does death. Death brings no appeasement. It in no way allows the story to conclude. Indifferent to these pitiful vicissitudes, cosmic fear continues to expand. It swells and takes form.

It is possible, in fact, that beyond the narrow range of our perception, other entities exist. Other creatures, other races, other concepts and other minds. Among these entities some are probably far superior to us in intelligence and in knowledge. But this is not necessarily good news. What makes us think that these creatures, different as they are from us, will exhibit any kind of a spiritual nature? There is nothing to suggest a transgression of the universal laws of egotism and malice. It is ridiculous to imagine that at the edge of the cosmos, other well-intentioned and wise beings await to guide us toward some sort of harmony. In order to imagine how they might treat us were we to come into contact with them, it might be best to recall how we treat 'inferior intelligences' such as rabbits and frogs. In the best of cases they serve as food for us; sometimes also, often in fact, we kill them for the sheer pleasure of killing. This would be the true picture of our future relationship to those other intelligent beings. Perhaps some of the more beautiful human specimens would be honoured and would end up on a dissection table - that's all.

And once again, none of it will make any sense.

This desolate cosmos is absolutely our own. This abject universe where fear mounts in concentric circles, layer upon layer, until the unnameable is revealed, this universe where our only conceivable destiny is to be pulverised and devoured, we must recognise it absolutely as being our own mental universe."

WHAT a relief from self-help books.