The universe is not a story and it does not pause to admire itself. What has happened will happen again because matter remembers. Stone remembers. Blood remembers. The past is not behind us. It is beneath our feet.

I have traveled far enough to know that distance teaches nothing. The same hands build, the same hands break, and the same hands reach for comfort when the breaking is done. A man imagines himself singular but he is assembled from the same materials as every other man. Lime and iron and water and a spark. Remove the spark and the rest falls back to the ground.

Violence is the engine that turns the world. Not hatred. Not cruelty. Those are ornaments. The engine is force. Every river proves it. Every storm. Every bone that cracks before it bends. War is only force with a uniform and a drumbeat. Call it god if you need a word that sounds large enough.

Look at the creatures that share this earth. They do not kneel before ideas. The wolf does not ask the deer for permission. The crow does not mourn the egg it drops. They act because they are built to act. Men invented conscience to soften the sound of their own teeth.

I keep a book. It is not holy. It is not merciful. It is accurate. In it I draw what I see. Plants, stones, insects, the shapes men make when they are afraid. Once I drew the footprint of a man who bled to death on a dirt road. You could see where he stopped trying. That is also a kind of signature.

People believe there is a moral current running through the universe. They believe the good are tallied and the wicked weighed. I have looked. There is only motion. There is only collision. Whatever survives writes the history.

Restraint is not virtue. It is a bet against your own nature. Sooner or later the debt comes due. The hand that does not close will be closed by something else.

Before there were armies there were stars tearing at one another. Before there were laws there was hunger. After we are gone there will still be pressure and fracture and collapse. The universe does not learn. It only continues.

I have seen cities raised from mud and I have seen the same cities sink back into it. I have seen children play in streets where men once screamed. They laugh. They always laugh. The ground beneath them has not changed.

You are not outside this. No one is. Even refusal is a form of participation. Even fear is a step in the dance.

When you are gone I will still be here. Not as person but as record. As mark. As sum. The world keeps its own accounts and it never misplaces a figure.

Everything is written. Not in ink but in what remains.

And something always remains.