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, collect your worldly things and consign them to a cardboard box. It will not bear your name because, by then, you won’t have one. Your crate will be addressed to your destination: your last resting place. The infinite, inertial lock: the Iron Mountain.
They will gather you up, all your belongings, all your precious things and every remnant that you were ever there. They will open the rear gates to the citadel a final time and you will be cast out, nameless, pastless, futureless. 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 them, brick by brick until nothing but a rubble-strewn wasteland remains. The trophies on which they etched your name they will scratch and dent and melt for scrap. Your legacy: the dust that blows, and silts, and forms dunes with the anonymous dust of countless others.
On that day they will come for you to that cardboard box that bears the legend of your destiny. The Iron Mountain, the place from which no one returns.
We are but dust.
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