Twilight Approaches Acedia
Twilight Approaches Acedia
Twilight Sparkle couldn't stop looking at trees. There was something about their figure, how they flowed in the breeze like they were never bothered by anything that caught her gaze as she pondered and wondered thru the streets. She took notice on how she'd been eating out more, how her strolls slowed in pace as she reflected on all those words and concepts she'd read in those books. They seemed to kind of blend together, the ideas and concepts. Knowledge was like the never-ending appetite of a great beast, the more you learned and gathered to more you realized that you knew so little. There was an irony floating about her buzzing thoughts as she waded thru the crowds and noises of that town - the more you learn, the dumber you feel.
She'd always nibble on the left portion of her bottom lip as she thought. Folks would exchange some kind of token greeting as they passed her, and she always responded but never conceptualized the interaction. She would pause in her quandaries to try and recall a particular pony's name then bathe in a brief rush of guilt due to her forgetfulness. She noticed that she started to rhythmically click her far-right teeth together in conjunction with her front-left hoof smacking against the ground. Something about tapping beats and noises added flavor to the strange places her mind would wander.
Halfway to the cafe, Twilight Sparkle stopped in the breeze to look up at the trees. She tilted her head and squinted her eyes at them - those perplexing things. They were technically alive, but had no canny trace of traits one would associate with being such. No blood, no thoughts, no friends, no movement. She projected pieces of herself upon them, thinking those trees looked back at her with baffled eyes wondering how those moving pony-things could be classified as alive.
"Why, good morning Twilight!" said some unimportant auburn chap as he walked by.
"What constitutes something being alive?" Twilight asked, eyes still stuck on the strange structure of those trees.
That unimportant auburn chap stopped and blinked whilst adjusting his grocery bags and stammering some nonsense. "Well…I, uh… I suppose things that are alive breathe!"
"Trees don't breathe…" Twilight said, shifting her head to left. "Bacteria doesn't breathe either really, not in the way we do."
"Oh… well I suppose I didn't really think about that…"
"So breathing can't be the only factor. What else? What do trees and ponies and bacteria have in common?"
"I, uh. I really gotta get goin' Twilight."
"It can't be any specific organ function, only animals have those. Ponies and trees grow, but single cell bacteria doesn't really. Hmm… trees don't move."
She turned and started back along the sun baked path to that cafe on the corner with the comfortable white seats, leaving the confused and unimportant auburn chap blinking and walking. Her hooves clopped upon the ground in the same tempo as the clicks of her teeth. She thought about not being alive, how upon her death she'd suddenly and permanently be regarded in the past tense. "Twilight is this and that" would forever become "Twilight was this and that". She thought about all the hooves and all those eyes that had poured thru all those books in all those libraries. How each and every separate life touched and remained on that book. How the thoughts of those authors that had struggled and researched remained forever locked in scratchy, symboly word form long after their brains stopped working. She thought about that song she had heard on some primordial record machine she'd seen in some unremarkable inventor's workshop and how the pony singing had died in some tragic accident. She thought about how inherently creepy it was to listen to a voice that could no longer be produced by natural, alive vocal chords. She thought about how those particular vocal chords had rotted away in a box in the ground somewhere.
She entered the cafe and asked for the same old boring table and ordered the same old boring food. Every time she found herself there, she promised herself that next time she'd try a different item on the menu. But she never did. Whenever she went there, it was because she craved that same old boring dish. She tapped her hoof against the table in a Sisyphean attempt to hasten the passage of time. She thought about how strange it was that she could 'hear' the words she thought in her head without actually hearing them.
Twilight Sparkle closed her eyes and wondered if the world around her had disappeared because she wasn't looking at it. She remembered some philosopher trying to deny that physical material exists and how nopony can explain how sensory information gets turned into ideas. That philosopher said that our minds are made of ideas, and we really only ever experience those ideas. She thought about having the idea of 'table' and all the other ideas that are connected to table: sitting, eating, writing, feeding, reading, waiting, resting, chair, stare, meal, book, unicorn, bored.
A massive growl encompassed her gut and wiggled it's way around. Twilight Sparkle would sometimes talk to her body like is was a separate entity. In her head, she'd refer to herself as 'we' without any thought or pretext and silently worried that she had some kind of undiagnosed mental illness. She theorized that if the mind continued thinking after death that she'd miss her body. Then she thought about all those grotesque bodily functions she constantly had to deal with. The damn thing always had to urinate - there were so many fluids. Fluids freaked her out. The word made her mind jump to instances where she stepped in something wet and was immediately unnerved. She march straight to a sink and scrub that hoof, no matter what the liquid was.
She rubbed her chin with impatience and stared up at a cracked windowsill on the second story. It amazed her that nopony else seemed to notice it and how such a fissure must surely be repaired. It smacked her of untidiness, which had begun to bother her more and more. Spike was a particular culprit, always leaving debris and trash around the library before wandering off. She'd always spot some litter in the corner off the room and could never ignore it for long.
Her mind wandered upon StarSwirl the Bearded and how he probably had no idea how memorable he'd be when he was her age. It like all those characters in the stories she read, how none of them knew what lied in store in their future. There was on particular old tale, one about a fellow that brings fire from the sky and gives it to ponies. Things didn't really work out for him in the end, and he ended up trapped in a big empty city. Twilight about how he could've never even imagined that would happen to him.
Her eyes caught the waitress bring in her meal. She thanked that pony, and thought her more important than that auburn chap from before. As she nibbled away, her mind conjured up some kind of fantasy that the waitress was in fact a secret agent. She poured upon romanticized adventures with complex plot lines, and how Twilight herself was but a background character in one of the waitress's big missions. She frowned at that thought - the idea that all her struggles and trials had all happened just to get her here at this cafe in time to be a background character in a scene with this spy-waitress. She thought of all those nameless characters in the stories she'd read that had been thrown in just to populate an area. She frowned and became overly worried that she was one of those, a nameless nopony in the great story of life. She worried she existed solely for the purpose of sitting at this table at this moment, and that when she left her purpose would be complete. Would she die then, once her purpose was complete? She wondered if there was some afterlife that had big clocks that recorded the amount of time one wasted doing eclectic tasks. She thought that she must have spent at least 3 solid weeks urinating in her lifetime. Her meal didn't seem so appealing now.
She paid the spy-waitress and tipped her rather well. If that was her sole purpose for existing, she would fulfill that role exceedingly by gum. She wandered off back towards the the library with thoughts still blazed and spinning, strangely satisfied that her could-be role in life was now fulfilled. Twilight Sparkle stared at the ground on the way back, and the rest of the world carried on around her like she wasn't even alive.
Author's Note
The rain gathers in a little puddle in the parking lot outside my dorm room window in just the right spot for the streetlamp above to shine on it and I think it's really beautiful.