This, allegedly, is bliss

The author’s foreword in Ermanno Cavazzoni’s Brief Lives of Idiots:

What follows is one calendar month. Each day holds the life of a kind of saint, who experiences agony and ecstasy the way traditional saints do. Then our month ends, because everything in this world must end, even our brief idiot lives.

What month comes after, no one knows for sure; whether, for example, it will bring us laughter or tears, solitude or companionship. There is only conjecture. Some of it quite remarkable.

Some maintain that the month after never ends; this is a wild idea, it makes one tired just thinking about it.

Others say that we start over and over again, perhaps on another planet; yet each time humanity becomes a degree more idiotic. Until, in a slow progression, from planet to planet, complete and total idiocy is reached, and no one remembers a thing, not even the most basic, such as, for example, feeling any different from a rock or a meteorite. This, allegedly, is bliss.

It has been called a state very much like that of lead.

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