12.1.583
It seems an age since I last wrote on this grey paper—that I suppose must be impregnated with the vile soot that so spoils the air—and yet only a few days have passed by. Such days!
I was correct before. All my thoughts were correct. This is good, for it means that the storm in my head has not sunk down to the place where my real mind cogitates.
There is a test that a nogoth may take in order to be accepted by the Mavrosopolis into the citidenizenry. My intention is to put myself forward for such a test.
I have looked at myself in the cracked mirror that my mother gave me. I am pale, haggard, and my eyes are dull. My skin is prematurely aged, and stained with soot. My parasol is a mongrel, composed of oddments that I found in the gutter. Citidenizens, I notice, carry nice parasols, some of them with lamps underneath to illuminate their way. I imagine these parasols acting both in the physical street, lighting the way, but also as illuminating the philosophical street—the bright path that I have become so fond of. If I could acquire such a parasol, I keep telling myself, then I would not stumble.
Today I went for the first time into the Tower of the Thawers. It is a remarkable place: a marvel of white marble, a spectacle, that left me aghast, that left me agog. It is a place whose occupants—a grim band of people with worry-lined faces and shoulders bowed under the responsibility that I dream of receiving—are devoted to the elimination of frost. Frost, it turns out, is an anti-Mavrosopolitan entity, a schema from outside that must not be allowed to disrupt the existence of the conurbation in which we all live. Such was news to me. There have been frosts on clear winter nights, that is for sure, and yet I am reminded of bustling people carrying what at the time seemed absurd implements, devices that I now know to be part of the equipment of the thawer. These people—who I managed to ignore in recent years, perhaps because I was too busy denying the existence of everything around me in my rage of anguish—live to protect the Mavrosopolis from frost, which they do by thawing out frozen parts. For frost is an agent of erasure, and erasure is the great enemy.
I must devise a mantra. I must not forget anything that I have learned. I am a sponge. A sponge soaks things up. The storm in my head must blow itself out and my mind must become a sponge, absorbing information, knowledge, and, please, wisdom, so that my place in the citidenizenry is assured.
It seems that I must become acquainted as much as possible with the concept of warmth, for it is warmth that halts the erosion — the erasure — created by frost. This is good. I like warmth. Too often I have found myself shivering in the gutter with only a rotten potato and half a black olive for supper; and that disgusting water that always reeks of soot and tastes of salt. I must find a place where the food is not rancid and where the water is pure. Once, it did occur to me that there is no such place, but then I realised that such an idea must be an absurdity.
I noticed too how keen were the masters of the Tower of the Thawers—in their black suits and their low hats and their fine gloves—to promulgate the notion of citidenizenship. I understood this immediately; it chimed with my own thought. To become a citidenizen is to inhabit a finer world, a world of light, goodness, peace, and, perhaps, one of interest.
Is it wrong to feel bored out on the streets? I have never once heard a nogoth say that he was bored. My mother never once told me that she was bored. It seems to me as I write now that there was never any time to be bored. And yet, despite this freight from the past weighing me down, I do know boredom and I wish to eradicate it from my mind. I want to find a life more interesting, more worthy.