Apex Ash Quotes

I leave it in writing for those who will come after me that I do not believe in anything and that forgetfulness is the only salvation. I would like to forget everything, to forget myself and to forget the world. True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes. I don't need any support, encouragement, or consolation because, although I am the lowest of men, I feel nonetheless so strong, so hard, so savage! For I am the only man who lives without hope, the apex of heroism and paradox. The ultimate madness! I should channel my chaotic and unbridled passion into forgetfulness, escaping spirit and consciousness. I too have a hope: a hope for absolute forgetfulness. But is it hope or despair? Is it not the negation of all future hopes? I want not to know, not to know even that I do not know. Why so many problems, arguments, vexations? Why the consciousness of death? How much longer all this thinking and philosophizing?

He was aware of his body as a shell. Fragile, thin as excuses. A vessel containing the dust of his essential him-ness which would be lost when the vessel failed. Well, that was the way of the world. For a time he was fixed in his body, stuck and named and fixed in place, but one day that would not be the case. One day only his name would remain, on a tombstone or etched onto an urn, marking his dried bones or ashes.

Aedion tracked the man the entire time, nothing human in Aedion’s eyes. An apex predator who had found his prey at last. No, not prey. Never with him. But his partner. His mate.

I know that our efforts all come to nothing. Analyze life, tear its trappings off, lay it bare with thought, with logic, with philosophy, and its emptiness is revealed as a bottomless pit; its nothingness frankly confesses to nothingness, and Despair comes to perch in the soulI know the end of us all is nothing, I know that at the end of Time, the reward of our toil will be nothing — and again nothing. I know that all our handiwork and all our ideas will be destroyed. I know that not even ash will be left from the fires that consume us. I know that our ideals, even those we achieve, will vanish in the eternal darkness of oblivion and final non-being. There is no hope, none, in my heart. I know, No promise, none, can I make to myself and to others. No recompense can I expect for my labors. No fruit will be born of my thoughts. I know the time — eternal seducer of all men, eternal cause of all effects — offers me nothing but the blank prospect of annihilation. So, my dignity is broken and weak, in recognition of my impending defeat. The man who is alone, who stands on his own feet, who is stripped bare, who asks for nothing and wants nothing, who has reached the apex of disinterested­ness not through blind renunciation but through ex­cess of clear vision, turns to the world which stretches out before him as a burned prairie, as a devastated city — a world in which no churches, asylums, refuges, ideals, are left — and says: «Though you promise me nothing I am still with you, I am still an atom of your energies, my work is part of your work; I am your companion and your mirror as you march on your merciless way. But I owe nothing to any one. I would be responsible to freedom alone.