The Dark Ground

• The universe was dark before we named it, and will be darker still when we are done with our naming.
• Light does not oppose the dark. It interrupts it — briefly.
• Consciousness is perhaps the universe's least necessary experiment.
• Progress: the magnificent story we tell ourselves while entropy waits, indifferent and exact.
• The darkness requires no argument. It simply continues.
• To call oneself a nihilist is still to care about the name. I prefer accuracy.
• Every form is a temporary negotiation with formlessness. Formlessness ultimately wins every negotiation.
• We were not extinguished. We were concluded.
• Hope is the refusal to read the composition correctly — to insist on the light while ignoring the ratio of dark to light.
• The cosmos does not know the word tragedy. That word is ours, and it will leave with us.
• Shadow is not the absence of light. Light is the interruption of shadow. The difference is everything.
• Meaning was always a local phenomenon — brief, provincial, and already fading at the edges.
• What preceded us was silence. What follows will be the same silence, unaware of the interruption.
• I am not pessimistic. I am proportionate.
• Structure does not resist entropy. It postpones it, briefly, and we call that postponement civilization.
• We lit the dark and called it history. The dark was not altered. The dark was not even watching.
• The star does not shine for you. It burns because burning is what stars do before they stop.
• We speak of what we leave behind. As though the dark were a room that would remember the furniture.
• Every philosophy that ends in comfort has stopped too soon.
• The atom does not grieve its dissolution. Only the arrangement does — briefly, and only while it can.
• We were not placed here. We happened here. The distinction is the whole of it.
• To call the universe indifferent is almost to flatter it. Indifference implies a subject doing the ignoring.
• Extinction is not the opposite of existence. It is existence, completing itself.