More of The Room

..Here the consciousness, not the political system, was genuinely all inclusive, and thus here there was only one – both trader and politician, doctor and assassin, cop and robber – if somewhat confused.

But no unity, however unfamiliar and however unusual, can long survive a lack of common purpose. With no shared fora for a debate, with no sources of biting satire and no free press to speak of, the Room's development of shared ideals was tepid and idle to the point of despair.

Indeed, were the Room to have had access to the concept of despair it seems likely that this would have become its bloody standard, its sacred emblem. If only the dusty (and, it must be said, unread) copy of Camus had chanced to fall open on a critical page, revealing the concept in all its glory, then the Room would have found a goal. But Camus remained unread and unfallen. The Room found another raison d'etre.

Strangely, for a consciousness so derived from decay and neglect, it was to be hope that it chanced upon. How exactly this occured eludes explanation, but, suffice it to say, one day the Room (silently) announced to itself that it hoped things were ok.

Now, to others, filled with myriad bitternesses and the sweet overflowing sense of time and thought, this may seem a trivial thing. I assure you that it was and is not. In the course of time it may of course become trivial, in the way that a child's first tears and cries are swallowed up in the lifetime of his emotions, concealed and revealed, but that their meaning to his parents is more than can be told with words. That fullness of time is not yet upon us, and so we must pretend that we can understand the importance of the hope that became the heart of the Room's existence.

The very essence of the sadness that the hope that had been born was that, of course, things were not ok. How could the Room's consciousness lead to anything other than tragedy? How could the Room's simple and all-consuming wish be met with anything other than despair? For the Room was sterile and immobile, crippled by its own bizarre composite, half-real nature.