🔙 The Sepulchre of Unbecoming ⚙️

In that antelucan hour when the firmament hangs like a funereal drapery above the pestilent earth, I beheld a race most lamentable and prodigious: mankind, not advancing toward the hoary sanctity of age, but retrograding, by some blasphemous arithmetic of Time, into the larval dimness from which all breath first issues. Their years did not accrue; they were unstitched. Each dawn annulled a wrinkle, each midnight exhumed a buried vigor, until the venerable patriarch, whose brow had been a manuscript of sorrows, awoke with the perfidious flush of thirty summers, and thereafter with the febrile radiance of adolescence, and thereafter with the ghastly candor of infancy, and thereafter—God avert the contemplation!—with less than infancy: a quiver, a pulp, a premonition.

No cradle received them at the terminus. Rather there waited an obscure recession into minute and eyeless abjection, as though the soul itself, weary of architecture, preferred the uncarven abyss. I saw matrons, once august beneath the diadem of grief, surrendering by degrees their stateliness, their recollections, their very crimes. Names fell from them first, then vows, then those exquisite afflictions by which personality is hammered upon the anvil of mortal intercourse. The murderer forgot blood; the saint forgot prayer; the widow forgot the dear cadaver to whom her tears had been betrothed. Memory, that sable archivist, was plundered chamber by chamber.Yet most hideous was not this forfeiture of wisdom, but the inversion of pity. For among these retrogressive creatures, every tenderness became anticipatory mourning. Parents regarded their grown children with a dread more profound than burial, knowing they must one day swaddle those same towering forms, must one day decipher in their senile gaze the first pale vacancy of childhood returning, must one day hear eloquence collapse into syllabic mist. Lovers, embracing, clasped not promise but subtraction. Beauty itself was sepulchral, because every kiss erased.And through all streets there passed a singular silence, save where some ancient philosopher, newly become a boy, laughed with atrocious innocence at the funeral of his own mind. The bells tolled not for the dead, but for the diminishing. The very mirrors, those argent confessors, grew traitorous; they restored yesterday what today had revoked, until the houses were peopled by apparitions of futures already undone.Thus did humanity flourish backward, like roots ascending into air while the flower sank, petal by petal, into the black loam of pre-existence. And I, standing amid that hideous chrysalis of unbeing, could not determine whether Time was devouring its children, or whether the children, in their terror of the tomb, had chosen to become the tomb’s forgotten dream.