Konstantinou, Lee

Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire

New York

Harper Perennial

2009

"Like some inoperable cancerous thing inside his brain, a new mental organ had awakened, insistently and without mercy pushing him forward, punishing him with guilt, compelling him to feel things and want things that can't be argued for or against on the basis of logical reasoning, analytical skill, rational self-interest, sexual desire, or anything of that familiar sort."

Eliot feels ashamed that he is asking himself this question, ashamed for his family, for his fellow humans, for all their mundane savagery. This nightmare of shame started back at the hotel suite in Barcelona, back when he saw the dazed face of that drugged girl, her sleeping innocence, back when the irreversibility of what WIlliam Pearson was about to do to her had dawned on him. Like some inoperable cancerous thing inside his brain, a new mental organ had awakened, insistently and without mercy pushing him forward, punishing him with guilt, compelling him to feel things and want things that can't be argued for or against on the basis of logical reasoning, analytical skill, rational self-interest, sexual desire, or anything of that familiar sort. This, Eliot decides, sucks; it sucks, sucks, sucks. Fuck [End Page 252] this moral feeling. He wants, more than anything, not to think in this way anymore. He wants not to feel shame for his family, for himself, for the actions of people he will never meet and for whom by any reasonable criteria he has no direct responsibility.
(pp. 252-3)

Body::Disease::Cancer

Reading

Konstantinou, Lee. Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.

05/05/2009