🇪🇷GötterdämmerungOne of my favorite writers, Tom Robbins, is dead. His book Jitterbug Perfume made immortality feel like an act of defiance, gave us Alobar, the king who refused to rot. And now he's gone. No beet pollen, no tantric rituals, just the final punctuation marks we all get eventually.
Alobar cracked the code with ritual & raw defiance, treating eternity like a banquet he refused to leave. OTOH Fosca from All Men Are Mortal figured out the true joke. Without urgency, life is just a rerun with worse writing. He didn't live. He lingered instead.
My OC Cartaphilus was the bastard child of both, raised on the dirt of better men. He's Alobar without the bliss & Fosca without the despair.
#Fosca
#AllMenareMortal
#SimonedeBeauvoir
A relic who refused to fossilize. This idea started with Asimov's Last Man on Earth. That image of a lone survivor kicking around the ruins of a world that no longer needed him stayed with me for a long time. But Cartaphilus doesn't get the clean loneliness of an empty planet. Instead, he got history, over & over, on repeat. No villain's fall. Just the long slow grind of meaning dissolving, until the past is just another story nobody believes.