Wounds Self-Inflicted: a Double-Edged Sword

Moebius

It is the misanthrope’s curse to realise that the clarity that comes with an open mind cannot be confined to the theoretical and will wash the streets with the violence of its revolutionary zeal, often opening onto vistas of bestial ugliness that darken the heart’s high ideal.

He felt encased in an alien bubble; a foreign object in a sea of phlegm. He carried his books in the brown paper bag provided by the old lady in the second-hand shop; whether to protect them from physical damage or to avoid offending that sea of so-called humanity, he couldn’t be entirely sure.

It wasn’t until he looked back that he could see clearly the moments that’d hung so heavy on his day: the people in the street cursing their shallow language in accents disinclined to anything else; hawking to spit as if it were a human right; making their ugliness evident by wearing garments that advertise the cultural poverty of rampant capitalism.

And so the books; the only source of wonder that never lose their power; their aching pages; their slow decay; their organic bouquet; the books that remain to stand alone at the picket line in the cold climate of technology’s factory where all is honed down to the width of the byte. (A byte being the first level of complexity in the philosophy of computing power; a combination of more than one of the smallest mechanical parts, a bit.)

And furthermore are these books not the earliest of mechanised technologies, these books that, in part, brought about both the dark inquisitions and the tyranny of religion and the enlightenment itself?

Is there is no blade colder nor one more honed than that which constitutes a double-edged sword?