[towntravis]

I began reading Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, this morning and have only put it down briefly throughout the day; I shall assuredly finish reading it tonight. The writing is excellent, and I could extol any number of quotes from its pages. However, this one in particular caught my attention, as it voices a thought that has often been my own during the past several years:

“They spoke of a heaven, where once we all lived and died,
sentenced for our sins to this pandemonium we call the world.”

Verily, it could be. Perhaps we are all already dead. We traverse unknowing in our death, deluded to believe that it is life and that we may yet attain Heaven, for without that hope we would surely descend into madness. Like the foolish dead spirits encountered by Memnoch in Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil, we have constructed a world of beauty and pleasure out of the meaningless void that is truly our abode. Those who are most fearful of reality are the most ardent disciples of religion. They cannot accept the truth that they are dead, so they seek to sway all the Dead to give in to their lie. Many find no solace in fairy tales and, in fact, need none. They know what they are and find no shame in it. The time for shame and regret has passed. If such a thing is truly our fate, then we lived our lives and reveled in our sins and now we must pay the piper. We are dead and this is Hell.