Our Common Tragedy

Day 2,747, 18:51 • Published in USA USA • by Silas Soule

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"The inequalities of a civil e-society -- happily -- can be resolved by playing with a non-destructive sense of self-respect, combined with a dose of pity and compassion for one's fellow players.

...

"In joy and sorrow all are equals. Take other beings' pain for your own. It may seem irrational, but that is just your ego clinging to your avatar. There is no subjective suffering. Pain is pain, period. Dispel it. Tell yourself: 'This avatar is not mine.' All the joy the New World contains comes through wishing happiness for others. When others are at fault, I'll take and turn the blame upon myself, then confess."

-- Phoenix Quinn, Day 1608, FREEDOM: No Time To Lose





"The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use..." — William Faulkner







music from BEAR CAVALRY: custom hands



Our Common Tragedy


I feel that this game was not made for me as a man, but as a means to find my real work as a writer -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit. Do you see? Not for glory. Least of all for profit. But to create out of the materials of a virtualized and boxed-in human spirit something which did not exist before.

This game is only mine to play in trust. It is easy to calculate the benefit of time spent here as commensurate with the purpose and significance of my original expectations. And I would like to find a similar equation for whatever silly acclaim I have garnered too, by using this platform as a forum from which I might be listened to by the young men and women who are already dedicated, in their hearts and minds, to the same anguish and travail.

I know that among you is already one or two who will one day share this perspective.




^ Possibly PQ's Pa ?




Our e-tragedy today is a general and universal fear so long sustained by now that we can barely even bear it. There are no longer problems of the e-spirit. There is only the question: When will I be occupied? Because of this, the young eRepper writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

They must learn them again. They must teach themselves that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and having learned that, forget it forever, leaving no room in the workshop for anything but the old-time verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Until we do so, we labor under a curse. The writer who doesn't grasp this writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal e-bones, leaving no e-scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.








Until a writer relearns these things, he or she will write as though standing among and watching the end of player-kind, which is a metaphor for the end of man. I decline to accept the end of the game. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless e-rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more soun😛 that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

No. I refuse to accept this. I believe that player-kind will not merely endure; we will prevail. We are immortal, not because we alone amongst the creatures of the world have inexhaustible voices, but because we carry a great warrior spirit that is capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.







The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things.

It is the privilege of the writers to help player-kind endure by lifting hearts, by reminding all of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of our past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of the game, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help us all endure and prevail.



























And join the SFP today!