Knowledge is the hum of a fluorescent tube light. It illuminates everything whilst staining with yellow nausea. What once was a warm blur of eudaimonia becomes a shrill kind of clarity. Everything turns mirage-like and uncomfortable. It is bread crust and mildew. It is leathery skin and the tongue of an old, wrinkled boot. If we are merely flesh bags, why does virtue still call to us? Why does that ancient dream return each night – the dream of discipline and of swollen pleasures? It is easier to surrender to the latter – to feast at the buffet. We can’t. We must be driven to insanity. And you’ll be the only one. You always are the only one. Everyone’s sin is so curated today. It is monetized and catalogued. It comes and goes in vogue. Vice becomes parody – hunger growing only stronger after each feeding. It is a civilization dazzling until it burns. Our inheritance lies bleeding dry. We stab at it and drink its blood. Wizards pitch new gospels, new definitions, new dogmas – guiding us towards formless, unending nothingness. And they do it with hubris. “I am Satan,” they tell you, as you continue to walk in step. They press the world into paste. Even when you hear the singing in the trees, you keep marching. Your birthright isn’t the only thing on the altar. You sing, deracinated, stretched across their stone slab – grinning from ear to ear. They cut off your wings and call it “fashionable”. They whisper such terrible things in your ear. It is a bedtime story. That’s all the past is now – fallen empires, forgotten virtues, your father’s voice. A hand moves over your form. You are only clay. Everything shifts and bends. “Goodnight”.