Iron Mountain
Ahh, the good old days, when the abyss stared resolutely back into you.
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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
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.
For it is written, in St. Pimco’s letter to the Hypocrites:
1 And they will open the rear gates to the Citadel and they will cast you out. And they will give unto you your cardboard box.
2 And you will be nameless. And you will have no future. And you will have no past. And you will be as barren as the dirt upon the badlands of the Earth.
3 And they will fireth not their cannons. And they will singeth not their lamentations. For they will acknowledgeth not your time on Earth.
4 And they will wipe the record clean of you. And expunge you utterly: your saintly works; the temple on earth you made; all that was great, and all that was okay, and all the massèd hoards that were mediocre. And they will destroy the vain memorials erected to your greatness: they will tear them brick from brick until nothing remains but rubble strewn across a salted wasteland.
5 And your legacy shall be the atoms: the dust that blows, the silt that accretes, the dunes that form from the anonymised dust of countless for forsaken souls like yours.
6 For it is written: The Iron Mountain shall be the place from which no mortal soul returns.
7 We are but dust.
See also
