Iron Mountain

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You can’t run away forever, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a good head start.

— Steinman J in Bad v Goode

Ahh, the good old days, when the abyss stared resolutely back into you.

It is your destiny. It is your final entropic repose. However youthful, beautiful, exuberant or ambitious you are; however wild your dreams, however impregnable your business case, however ingenious your pitch: the Iron Mountain draws nearer. Time’s arrow hurtles toward it, drawn by its irresistible gravity. The cosmos may enlarge, but every one of us converges.

Eventually, they will come for you. You will not know when, or where, or why, but you will know it when they come. They will collect your worldly things, your precious baubles— every last remnant of your time — and they will consign it to a meagre casket. It will not bear your name because, by then, you won’t have one. It will instead bear your final destiny: the last, common, resting place for all mortal souls; the infinite, inertial lock: the Iron Mountain.

They will give it to you, open the rear gates to the Citadel a final time and cast you out, nameless, pastless, futureless. No cannons, no lamentations, no acknowledgment. They will wipe the record clean of you. They will expunge you utterly. Your saintly works; the temple on earth you made; the memorials to your greatness: they will tear them brick from brick until nothing remains but a rubble-strewn wasteland. Your legacy: the dust that blows, the silt that accretes, the dunes that form from the anonymised dust of countless for forsaken souls like yours.

The Iron Mountain, the place from which no one returns.

We are but dust.

See also

• Apocalypse
• Global financial crisis
• Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

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