The Aaron J Shay Experience

The not-yet-famous writer and musician, internet denizen and musical taxonomist.

The City of Forgotten Ideas

http://hitrecord.org/records/505461

A double-whammy today! Sample below, full text via the link above.

If you venture to the dark places of the city, where the street lights flicker and the sidewalks buckle from the force of the roots beneath them, you will find Ideas that have chosen to live in the slums and be forgotten. These are Ideas for things that inspire fear and terror; these are instruments of torture and death. These are the ideas of monsters. They know well their nature and so pursue the shadows, eager to stay hidden lest they be discovered once again. In these slums, you’ll be in no danger. Its denizens move swiftly and discretely through the streets, huddled and indiscernible from the brick, the concrete, the wind. They behave as time travelers afraid of damaging the future. These streets are silent.

But if you raise your eyes to the horizon, you can see a glittering light on the outskirts of the city, on top of a steep hill, its crest only accessible by an ivory gate at its base. It should come as no surprise that this is the home of forgotten gods and faiths. These city dwellers desperately long for supplication, dream of remembrance in some footnote on a forgotten page of history. Their sacred texts are vanished, if indeed they ever existed at all. These once powerful Ideas do nothing at all but polish their crowns and their swords and their hammers, should the world ever have need of them once more. Oh, they feud and fight amongst themselves, and of course they make love to one another, but their battles spill no blood and their love begets no children. A faith without a follower is impotent and powerless.

Both of these classes fret worthlessly, of course. Once an idea is forgotten, rare is the case when it is remembered again. We forget more than we can ever know, be it by choice or by force. With every book burned or left out of print, with every library sacked and pillaged, the city’s population burgeons.

  1. manwithhat posted this