Beauty

You want to believe beauty can save you, but it can't.

You want to believe you can save beauty, hold on to it, preserve it, and you can, but you won't.

The only relation possible between you and beauty is the one between the mirror and the light: both suffer endlessly for the other, but neither can bear the other's touch.

The Tower

Every week the tower grows taller. A new story is added, a new set of girders reclaims the emptiness. Or expands it. Because that is all the tower is: a framework, an outline - no floors, no walls, no roof - just a skeleton of steel and concrete with a staircase worming its way through, climbing forever upward.

This isn't how he'd planned it. When work on the tower first began, he'd meant it to have just eight stories. That had seemed reasonable. He hadn't know yet what companies would be leasing out the place, but given the location he didn't think selling eight floors of office space would be too much of a problem.

Then, when they'd finished working on the scaffolding for the eighth floor, he'd thought, why not just add one more? Maybe they could put in a rooftop restaurant. Or lease out the ground floor for shops and shift the offices one floor up. So a ninth floor had been added, then a tenth, then an eleventh.

By now he had lost count of just how many stories the tower had. Every week he would visit the construction site and the foreman would tell him that they were done with the structure and were ready to start putting in the floor and walls, and every week he would decide to hold off on that and go one story higher instead.

The foreman had started looking at him as though he were mad.

Maybe he was. It was a little crazy to go on building this way. By now they were well past the point when he could even pretend that the upper floors would ever be used. In fact, they were unlikely to even be built, because money was fast running out. The first time they'd gone over budget he'd gone back to his loan company and managed to talk them into increasing their funding, but he didn't think they'd fall for that again.

He really should stop. It wasn't just the money. The workmen were beginning to complain about the height, and who knew if so tall a building was even safe? And yet every time he stood in front of the tower, staring up at it, he was overcome by its sheer potential, by the incredible possibility of taking it a little further, a little higher.

Who cared if the floors and walls ever got built? If anyone ever lived or worked here? Who cared if he ran out of money, had to abandon the whole project, spent the rest of his life in debt? At least it would always be here, this monument to his appetite, this glorious reminder of how high he'd wanted to go, how close to the sky he'd managed to reach.

Egyptian thoughts

The difference between tyranny and democracy is that under tyranny ordinary men pretend to be monsters and under democracy monsters pretend to be ordinary men.

***

Power must be concentrated in the hands of a few for it to be power. Shared power is inertia, mass, nothing more. At the heart of every democracy lies a conjuring trick - true power is taken off-stage, while the illusion of power is put on display for all to see.

What makes democracy valuable is that maintaining the illusion keeps the powerful in check. The monster cannot leave his box, the puppetmaster cannot emerge from behind the curtain.

***

Power does not corrupt. Corruption empowers.

The ups and downs of life

Why are people so stupid?

Every two or three days there'll be someone who'll come up to me just as I've got into the elevator and ask "Going Down?". By itself, this would not be a totally unreasonable question. I mean, sure, there's a big yellow arrow pointing down that's flashing on top of the open door, which you would think might be a clue, but okay. Maybe you're colour blind. Maybe you've never figured out what those pesky arrow things are for. Maybe you've never been able to tell your up from your down. Maybe you're afraid of heights and can't bear to look up to see what's on top of the door. Maybe you saw the arrow but thought you would triangulate. Just in case some secret terrorist organisation had rigged the sign on top of the elevator JUST to fool you. Maybe.

The trouble is, I live on the top floor of my building. Top floor - meaning nothing overhead except God's blue sky, meaning the end of the line, meaning the lift stops here. The lift cannot be going anywhere but down because there is nowhere else for it to go! Yet every second day someone will ask. They even manage to look surprised when I tell them it is, as though it were some sort of lucky chance that they happened to catch it on its way down. Somedays I'm tempted to say, "No, going up" and leave them stranded there.

Morons.