Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes

how young Mortimer had always thought of it. His own room was a little isolated cell in which, with stolen candle ends, he could keep the surrounding darkness at bay, while everyone else had surrendered to sleep and allowed the night to come flooding in. By contrast with those unconscious ones his elders, it made him feel intensely alive in

every nerve and fiber of his young brain. The ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall below, the beating of his own heart, the long, drawn, rhythmical ah of the sea on the distant coast all filled him with a sense of overwhelming mystery, And as he read the soft thud of a blinded moth striking the wall above the candle would make him start, and listened like a creature of the woods at the sound of a cracking twig.

The battered old book had the strangest fascination for him, though he never quite grasped the thread of the story. It was called The Midnight Express, and there was one illustration on the fiftieth page at which she could never bear to look. It frightened him. Young Mortimer never understood

the effect of that picture on him. He was an imaginative but not neurotic youngster, and he avoided that fiftieth page as he might have hurried past the dark corner on the stairs when he was six years old, or as the grown man on the Lonely Road in the Ancient Mariner, who, having once looked round, walks on and turns no more his head. There was nothing in the picture apparently to account for this haunting dread. Darkness, indeed

was almost its chief characteristic. It showed an empty railway platform at night, lit by a single dreary lamp, an empty railway platform that suggested a deserted and lonely junction in some remote part of the country. There was only one figure on the platform, the dark figure of a man, standing almost directly under the lamp, with his face turned away towards the black mouth of a tunnel, which, for some strange reason plungung the imagination of the child into

a pit of horror. The man seemed to be listening. His attitude was tense, expectant, as though he were awaiting some fearful tragedy. There was nothing in the text, as far as the child read and could understand, to account for this waking nightmare. He could neither resist the fascination of the book, nor face that picture in the stillness and loneliness of the night. He pinned it down to the page, facing it with two long pins, so that

he should not come upon it by accident. Then he determined to read the whole story through, but always before he came to page fifty he fell asleep, and the outlines of what he had read were blurred, and the next night he had to begin again, and again before he came to the fiftieth page, he fell asleep. He grew up and forgot all about the book and the picture. But half way through his life, at that strange and

critical time. When Dante entered the dark wood, leaving the direct path behind him, he found himself a little before midnight waiting for a train at a lonely junction, And as the station clock began to strike twelve, he remembered, remembered, like a man awaking from a long dream. There under the single dreary lamp on the long, glimmering platform was the dark and solitary figure that he knew. Its face was turned away from him towards the black mouth of

the tunnel. It seemed to be listening, tense, expectant, just as it had been thirty eight years ago. But he was not frightened now as he had been in childhood. He would go up to that solitary figure, confront it and see the face that had so long been hidden, so long averted from him. He would walk up quietly and make some excuse for speaking to it. He would ask it, for instance, if the train was going to

be late. It should be easy for a grown man to do this, But his hands were clenched when he took the first step, as if he too were tense

and expectant. Quietly, but the old vague instincts awaking, he went towards the dark figure, and the lamp passed it, swung round abruptly to speak to it, and saw, without speaking, without being able to speak, it was himself, staring back at himself, as if in some mocking mirror, his own eyes alive, in his own white face, looking into his own eyes alive, the nerves of his heart tingled, as though their own electric currents would it. A wave of

panic went through him. He turned, gasped, stumbled, broke into a blind run out through the deserted and echoing ticket office onto the long moonlit road behind the station. The whole countryside seemed to be utterly deserted, the moonbeams flooded it with the loneliness of their own deserted satellite. He paused for a moment and heard, like the echo of his own footsteps, the stumbling run of something that followed

over the wooden floor within the ticket office. Then he abandoned himself, shamelessly to his fear, and ran, sweating like a terrified beast, down the long white road, between the two endless lines of ghostly poplars, each answering another into what seemed an infinite distance. On one side of the road, there was a long, straight canal in which one of the lines of poplars was again endlessly reflected. He heard the footsteps echoing behind him. They seemed to be slowly

but steadily gaining upon him. A quarter of a mile away he saw a small white cottage by the roadside, a white cottage with two dark windows and a door that somehow suggested a human face. He thought to himself that if he could reach it in time, he might find shelter and security and escape. The thin, implacable footsteps echoing his own were still some way off when he lurched, gasping into the little porch, rattled the latch, thrusted the door, and found it locked against him. There was no bell

or knocker. He pounded on the wood with his fists until his knuckles bled. The response was horribly slow. At last he heard heavier footsteps within the cottage. Slowly they descended the creaking stair. Slowly the door was unlocked. A tall, shadowy figure stood before him, holding a lighted candle in such a way that he could see little either of the holder's face or form. But to his dumb horror, there seemed to be a seer cloth wrapped round the face.

No words passed between them. The figure beckoned him in again without a word. The figure went before him up the crooked stair, with the ghostly candle casting huge and grotesque shadows on the whitewashed walls and ceiling. They entered an upper room, in which there was a bright fire burning, with an armchair on either side of it, and a small oak table on which there lay a battered book, a battered old book bound in dark red buckram. It seemed as though the guest had been long expected and

all things were prepared. The figure pointed to one of the armchairs, placed the candlestick on the table by the book, for there was no other light but that of the fire, and withdrew without a word, locking the door behind him. Mortimer looked at the candlestick. It seemed familiar. The smell of the guttering wax brought back the little room in the old Elizabethan house. He picked up the book with

trembling fingers. He recognized it at once, though he had long forgotten everything about the story, remembered the ink stain on the title page, and then with a shock of recollection, he came on the fiftieth page, which he had pinned down in childhood. The pins were still there. He touched them again, the very pins which his trembling, childish fingers had used so long ago. He turned to the beginning. He was determined to read it to the end now

and discover what it was all about. He felt that it must all be set down there in print, and though in childhood he could not understand it, he would be able to fathom it now. It was called The Midnight Express, And as he read the first paragraph he began to dawn upon him, slowly, fearfully, inevitably. It was the story of a man who, in childhood, long ago, had chanced upon a book in which there was a

picture that frightened him. He had grown up and forgotten it, and one night, upon a lonely railway platform, he had found himself in the remembered scene of that picture. He had confronted the solitary figure under the lamp, recognized it, and fled in panic, had taken shelter in a wayside cottage, had been led to an upper room, found the book awaiting him, and had begun to read it right through

to the very end at last. And this book, too, was called The Midnight Express, and it was the story of a man who in childhood it would go on thus forever and forever and forever. There was no escape. But when the story came to the wayside cottage for the third time, a deeper suspicion began to dawn upon him, slowly, fearfully, inevitably. Although there was no escape, he could at last try to grasp more clearly the details of the strange circle, the fearful wheel in which he was moving. There was

nothing new about the details. They've been there all the time, but he had not grasped their significance. That was all the strange and dreadful being that had led him up the crooked stair. Who and what was that the story mentioned something that had escaped him. The strange host who had given him shelter was about his own height. Could it be that he also? And was this why the face was hidden? At the very moment when he asked himself that question, he heard the click of the key

in the locked door. The strange host was entering, moving towards him from behind, casting a grotesque shadow, larger than human on the white walls in the guttering candlelight. It was there, seated on the other side of the fire, facing him, with a horrible nonchalance, as a woman might prepare to remove a veil. It raised its hands to unwind the sere cloth from its face. He knew to whom it would belong. Would it be living or dead?

There was no way but one. As Mortimer plunged forward and seized the tormentor by the throat, his own throat was gripped but the same brutal force. The echoes of their strangled cry were indistinguishable, And when the last confused sounds died out together, the stillness of the room was so deep that you might have heard the ticking of the old grandfather clock and the long drawn, rhythmical ah of the sea on a distant coast thirty eight years ago.

But Mortimer had escaped at last, Perhaps after all, he had caught the Midnight Express. It was a battered old book bound in red Buckram. Everybody dies, everybody there. That was Midnight Express by Alfred Noise. And sometimes you see it as the Midnight Express. But the version I've got from the anthology I got was Midnight Express. So the first thing is I'll tell you something about Alfred Noise himself. So. He was born in eighteen eighty died in nineteen fifty eight.

He was an English poet, storyteller and popular man of letters who his career traces a revealing archromade Wardian romance the mid twentieth century cultural critique. He was born in Wolverhampton and the West Midlands, in on sixteenth September eighteen eighty. His dad was also Alfred and his wife was Amelia Adams, and he spent formative years in Aberystwyth in Wales, where his father taught Latin and Greek, and the Welsh coast

and mountains left a permanent mark on his imagination. In eighteen ninety eight he went up to Exeter College, Oxford, where he rode energetically and studied fitfully. The often repeated anecdote that he missed part of his finals to seize publisher about his first book is essentially true. His debut collection, The Loom of Years nineteen oh two cost him a

degree but secured him a reputation. The volume was warmly received by established figures such as W. B. Yates and George Meredith, and it sold well with the general public as well, so after that the decade after that he

became famous. This was his arrival. So between nineteen oh three and nineteen oh eight he issued a stream of verse volumes, The Flower Rolled Japan, The Forest of Wild Time Poems, which contained the Barrel Organ, and he quickly became one of the most commercially successful poets in English. The High Women Imagine being a commercially successful poet these days. The High Women, first published in Blackwood's magazine in nineteen

oh six and reprinted the following year in forty. Singing Seamen and other poems, remained his most enduring worker, Ballad of Doomed Love, remembered for its incantatory refrains and vivid,

almost cinematic imagery. The same time, he embarked on a large scale historical narrative, especially Drake and English Epic, which he did over nineteen oh six and to nineteen oh eight, a twelve book blank verse treatment of Sir Francis Drake and Elizabethan SeaWorld, which aligned his poetic manner with that of Tennison and the late Romantics. By his early thirties he'd done all this, you know, when he was a

young man. He published multiple substantial volumes, gathered his work in collective form, and became, in the phrase of one critic, the most popular poet of his generation among ordinary readers, even as more fastidious review as being the cool on him. So he was a professional writer as well as a literary one. He wrote in short stories, essays, criticism, and fiction alongside poetry, and was industrious in cultivating Transatlantic audiences

he saw the bulk of the people lived. In nineteen oh seven, he married Garner Daniel's, daughter of an American diplomat, a union that anchored him socially and emotionally to the United States. He had successful lectures there in nineteen thirteen fourteen, and he was appointed as professor of Modern English literature at Princeton University, where he was until nineteen twenty three.

His students included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson, and his public persona urbane, patriotic eloquent, made him a natural platform figure. He had further experiments in narrative poetry and drama, such as Robin Hood plus He's Robin Hood play Sorry

Sherwood nineteen eleven, which was later retitled Robbinhood well. In the First World War, he was rejected for frontline service because of poor eyesight, and he worked for the Foreign Office alongside John Buchan on propaganda and morale building projects. He wrote some conventional patriotic verse and setales, and also produced more reflective work, notably the long anti war poem The Wine Press, which depicts in unsparing terms the suffering

and futility of modern conflict. The Victory Ball, inspired by his disgusted post war frivolity in London while the Dead was scarcely Buried, became his best known war poem. Its refrain under the dancing feet are the Graves indicts the forgetfulness of the living. After the war, he continued to produce fiction and tales of the uncannic ghost stories such as Lucitania Weights and The log of the Evening Star

are still anthologized, are they? Though this anthology? I've got quite an older one to nineteen eighties one, so he wrote. He was an agnostic originally and became increasingly preoccupied, preoccupied with relationship between science, faith and civilization, and he wrote a trilogy called of poems called The Torch Bearers Watchers of the Sky in nineteen twenty two, The Book of the Earth nineteen twenty five, and The Last Voyage nineteen thirty.

His private life in the twenties was marked by loss and reorientation. Garnet Noise died in nineteen twenty six when they were visiting friends in Saint gen dulus I don't know. I don't know if that's French or Spanish. Saint gen Duluze. I guess Luth would be in Spanisher, not with the Cumbrian accento, an event that pushed him further in Wood and Sharpeney's religious search. In nineteen twenty seven he married Mary angela Man, the widow of a Catholic officer, and

he himself was received into the Roman Catholic Church. And then he wrote a book about how he became a Catholic in nineteen thirty four. So he then settled in the Isle of Wight at Lyle Coumney Ventna, and he was a defender of tradition against the disintegrating forces in the modern world. He might choice of Shakespeare, Milton Johnson, bove All, Tennyson, I've got a lot of notes on him.

And then in these final decades Bouts of ill health and failing eyesight forced him to dictate rather than write. He spent much of the Second World War in North America lecturing for the Allied cause, before returning permanently to

the Isle of White in nineteen forty nine. Alongside serious work, he produced lighter pieces, notably Childham's children's verse Daddy Fell in the Pond, the title piece of A nineteen fifty two and he died of polio and the Isle of Wight in June fifty eight and was buried in the Catholic Cemetery Saint Save Years at Totland. By that time, his reputation had sunk. He was an embodiment of an obsolete sentimental format sentimental formally conservative strain of verse. But

he keeps coming through. Now. I thought this was an interesting story, really, So This One Midnight Express was published on the third November nineteen thirty five, significantly in an American newspaper supplement called This Week in many anthologies, So when we look at it, we think it's not the story that's important. You could probably give the bare plot in about two sentences and lose nothing, should we do it? So basically, a man reads a book as a small

boy which haunts him. He finds himself in that situation, and he finds himself kind of in the story, just repeating it round and round and round, and it's a bit horrific. There you go, we'll not really sure what happened. But what we have is we have this low, insistent field of dread which settles on the reader. And when

you find out what technically what happened. So it isn't the narrative that creates the dread in some cases, you know, in a traditional suspense novel, it's the narrative that racks up those emotions. Whereas this is the descriptions. You can tell he's a poet, the poetic nature of the prose. The imagery, you know, very significant imagery. What we got, I mean, you know you could paint. You could do a fantastic graphic novel of it. Actually, so somebody should

do it, not me. I can't draw. But you know you've got the Red Book, haven't you? That? Very the book read bookrom book and the where he you know, him reading it with the stolen candle stubs in this Elizabethan mansion bag on what a picture. And then you have him pinning the Then you've got the illustration that he doesn't want to see of the lonely platform with the single figure and the pins in the book, and

then basically you have then it morphing. So he's on that platform and then you know, it's so visual, is what I'm trying to say. And then he goes. Then he's greeted by this sear cloth. It's like a Muslim cloth, I think around the face. And I should have actually looked it up rather than just guessing what it was. To me, I saw this figure with a like you know, like they make puddings with Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim. I was mixed those two words up. They're quite different in meaning.

And you know, over his fiast, as we'd say, and he's led up the stairs with candlelight and you can just again the graphic imagery and he sits in this room with the fire and the armchairs, and there's the book, you know, and that's it. It's just the images. And so I think it's the it's the weirdness a little bit. It's like the just it's the dreamlike nightmarish quality of the images. It doesn't feel totally real. It is it's vibe. I keep coming back to this, don't I so? And

it's a dejah vous terror as well. It's you know, we've been here before. I'm going to come back to that in a minute. So you know, it's it's a clearly set up. It's a short story. I mean, it is one of the shortest ones I've done for a long time. I'm usually doing the hourly ones, and I've been doing the long added The Willows by Blackwood, I did Great god Pan by mac and the first Book of the Beatle by Richard Marshall. These are all like three hour jobs, you know, and this is a much

shorter story. It's nice to have a bit of a change. So when I was reading him, because of the poetics, I was, you know, you've got like the Highwayman, and you've got Walter Delomairez the Listeners, haven't you? And who was a poet? And of course one of my favorite book I'm looking at and I was Behold This Dreamer and Anthology by Delamaire. So there is something about Delamare is really good at conjuring these gothicky images. I'm thinking of All Hallows. But you know, a lot of his

books are like that. They've got a vibe, you know, and he's a very poetic writer. But I would say that Delamare has more story. All hallows is it's kind of short on story. It's a little bit like this, but a lot of the other stuff we've done by Delamare has a bit more story. So when we think about the so Delamaire tends to dissolve plot into mood, whereas noise hardens plot into a loop. In this story, childhood encounter book within the book and then they're strangling

that follows us back into the opening line. I mean, this idea of a story within a story is sort of very Arabian Nights. What was his name, Irwin? A book called the Arabian Nightmare and he, oh, what's his first name? Is famous Arabist and he did this story based on the Arabian Nights. The Arabian Nights famously our stories within stories, and it's a it's a technique of nesting a story within a story, which I really quite like.

And there's that's what we're seeing here. But you know, so we say Walter Delomare tends to dissolve plot into mood, and this is this loop, where As you may argue that Delomare understructures his tales until they're almost pure implication. I think of the last one we did, the Recluse. You know nothing which happens in that really, and they're almost pure implication. Almost nothing happens, and nothing is what

disturbs you. That's still a maire so noise. On the other hand, although he's a poet as well and uses that imagery, and I've just been talking about the imagery and the vibe that he conjures with the candles and these faces and the lonely I've just said that there isn't a lot of plot, but it is essential to the drive of the story. I think. I think the point I've just made there is quite weak, if you don't mind me saying, now we've got this idea of the trapped cycle, my mind being what it is, it

runs off into tangents, doesn't it. So I just knocked the microphone. Sorry. So the tangents that I came to were Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return, and of course Black Mirror, and and also Lewis Borges, you know, the Argentinian writer with these kind of loops and playing with time. So what we have we think Borcas's stories. You know, we think a Groundhog Day, of course, the movie Groundhog Day, whereby you're stuck in his repeating loop.

So it's it's it is, It's not an unfamiliar trope. With Borcas. We have like the Circular Ruins, where the dreamer spends his life constructing a man in dreams, only to discover at the end that he himself is in another's dream, you know, immune to fire because he's not real.

And then we have not necessarily circul but sometimes circular but self referential, the Library of Babel, the Immortal Garden, the Fucking Path Death, and the Compass, where characters moving structures that repeat branch your full back and the terrorized in discovering that one's freedom is framed by an inhuman design. I think this is a really important theme. It isn't necessarily implicit in this story. Well, no, it is implicit in this story potentially, but it's not explicit, whereas in

some of the Borcher stories. It is whereby this idea that we believe we're living a free life, and yet we are doomed to repeat patterns. Do you see what I'm saying, and so certainly that's what's happening here. He doesn't suspect there's a boy that he is trapped in a loop that he's going to he's going to be repeating. And of course, you know Black Mirror, the very successful

speculative fiction series on TV. It often uses these literal or digital loops, and they have the White Bear, which traps his protagonist in the daily reset of terror, amnesia, in public humiliation, humiliation. The same scenario is performed again and again as punishment and spectacle. The repetition itself is a toment that we have Black Museum extended with digital

cookies forced in the cycles of suffering and display. And the anthology as a whole hints that uploaded consciousness stuck in endless inescapable similars, and then we have this idea of eternal, indefinite route but they usually coded as hell. So you get this, you can you can do different

things with this. So the Groundhog Day could be hell, but there's there's comedy in there, and there is a lighter, and there's a possibility of escape, and in this story there is no I don't think there's a possibility of escape. In this story the amid Night Express, not even amid Night Express, Midnight Express. This guy's going to loop around. It was introduced to him as a child, and that was the kind of it, the tip they should have been the tip off, and he's doomed to just repeat

and go around. So in a sense, it is almost an imprisonment, a hellish imprisonment. So different writers play with this. Usually it's implicitly awful. It's usually quite horrific, this idea that we will never escape and related to that. So I think you can have it where it's just like a feature of you know that the sun goes comes around every day, the year repeats itself. We don't find

these essentially horrific. But and so on the one hand, we can have these loop stories whereby they're not horrific grind. I don't find I enjoy groundhog Day. And some of the barker stuff is just interesting. It has an edge of unpleasantness, I think, But some are explicitly some of the black mirrors of is explicitly horrific. We're stuck here. So my point here is that in some cases it's just a feature of natural The natural system like the sun coming up. In others, there is a hint that

there's a malign intelligence behind it. And this is what I think links it totally. My mind skips over, but I think these are you know, Germaine links. We have the love Crafting idea of cosmic horror, whereby we are the pawns of huge powers. And I think often in Lovecraft were mostly in love Craft. It's not that they have they just we're nothing to them, you know, It's

like us stepping on an ant hill. So but our lives are totally conditioned by these huge things, and we find out about it, we're going to go mad because our insignificance. But what I'm driving at in some of these stories we edge towards not the just the cosmic insignificance. So we have it's just a feature of the natural world. And so what you know, like in groundog Day, I feel like and then we have, yes, it's a feature

of the natural world. These are these huge, powerful things that could crush us, but they don't mean it's any harm that you don't care about us, but it's still fairly terrifying. And then we edge into this idea that actually this is being done in kind of some kind of demonic way, and these loops are deliberately created for us out of wickedness and evil in order to make

us suffer. Do you see what I'm saying now? This I always was really interested when I used to work with people with paranoid schizophrenia, because this is a recurrent feature of paranoid schizophrenia, particularly that they feel that they are not that this whole thing is a facade. It's a Truman show if you like, and this isn't Truman's is not in a loop, of course. So there are two ideas of the idea of the loop, and there's the idea of the world being controlled by shadowy, evil

forces who don't mince any good. But you can put the two together and make it especially horrible. So what I'm saying about the paranoid schizophrenics, I used to find that, you know, sometimes there were religious so it was demons who were doing this, and demons were in control of the world, and demons were trying to manipulate them and

had power. And then there was the other ones that were you know, it was the CIA, or it was the KGB, or was m I five or it was the police, that those were really common, but always it's shadowy forces whose most tives are very unclear. And when you press these people about why they'd want to do this. I remember doing this kind of technique. Very lovely woman, and she had this idea she'd probably be dead now.

She had this idea that she was being watched by the police, and they'd fixed cameras in her This is really common because being watched is really important in these paranoid delusions, and they'd fixed cameras in her house, everywhere she went. And so I did a kind of a CBT thing and deconstruction of it, which is to say, well, where's the evidence for this. Let's reduce it to absurdity, you know, reductio ad absurdum, and let's think about this.

So why is it? Well, because she'd been on holiday to Spain and she'd had this thought, which they call the psychotic insight, which is usually nonsense. And then of course when you build on that, very often that everything follows logically, but it's the initial psychotic insight which is the delusion. And this in her case, she believed that

the Spanish police thought that she was a prostitute. So you might arguably say, well, well there are lots of prostitutes in Spain and they don't do this to them. And they and you know, even if they thought the Spanish police thought you were a prostitute when you'd left Spain, you weren't their problem anymore. You're only there on holiday. Nobody. In her view, it was such an important thing. I'm like, I was burgled, I had my car broken into. They

never even turned up. Man, you know, why are they going to do this? I didn't actually say that, but you know, so I'm saying I can't see it would be a p and there are prostitutes in where we lived, and they don't do this to them, or do they Well she didn't know that, but they did with her. So then we worked out I said, well, how many rooms have you got? We worked out how many cameras and it was a multitude of cameras are in the garden as well. And I said, so let's think about this.

They've got somebody having to this is before AI. Somebody have to watch these cameras, and they've got to do twenty four hours. So they're going to be a shift system and they've got to be paid they've got to have holidays. There's going to be sick sickness, somebody's going to have to process it. There's going to have to be analysts looking at it. And they've never even approached you to accuse you of anything. So this is phenomenally expensive.

And of course she said to me, she's a lovely woman. She said, oh, yeah, I can see that. That doesn't make any sense to it, I said, And I thought I was getting somewhere, you know. And then she said, but look at that leaf, And I said, well, she's moved, hasn't it. I don't know, Yes, she said, it's moved since I was last year. They've been here. And so this idea of the paranoid obviously, this is only one

of many, many cases, this paranoid observation. And you see it in a less strong form, a weaker form, in sort of conspiracy theories, These ideas that people would go to a huge lengths to pretend people have gone to the moon, and the arguments they'll raise a sound on the face of it superficially attract Well, it's very expensive

and much easier not to go and just to pretend. Yeah, but but you know, why would you do that, or you know that the world's flat and it's just been withheld from us that aliens are in touch with but the governments are just not letting us know. And this idea of shadowy powers who were deceiving us. Now, don't get me wrong, I do believe that the governments do deceive us. See, there's an there's there's an issue of a kernel of truth in all of these things. It's

is when you've extrapolated to huge things. That's my I mean a lot of people, I swear to you, a lot of people will be listening to this who believe these things and they think and I've been called it. I had one guy contact me, called me an agent of an asset of the deep state. I'm like, they don't pay me, mate, So you know, if I am an asset, I want I want paying conditions set out and I want to be generously paid, and they're not paying me. So of course if they offered to pay me,

I would refuse, just as we're clear anyway. So anyway, so I've gone a long way about that, this idea. And let's talk about Fredrik Nietzsche. So Fredrik Nietzsche famously had this idea of the eternal return. So he was a German philosopher. He came across his idea or he concocted this idea in eighteen eighties, and it was only these fundamental ideas, and he talked it was so important. This actually sounds like a psychotic moment. Actually he had

this in August eighteen eighty one. This is usually how they strike walking by Lake Silver Plan in Switzerland, when the thoughts struck him with the force of a revelation. Sounds like a psychotic inside to me, what if everything occurs? But what I mean by that is it feels tremendously significant. So if you ever thought and you think, oh well, Coronation Streets on half past seven, doesn't hit you with

that revelation. Or you might think, do you know what, I think the council is wasting my council tax money and that doesn't hit you with the revelation. But it might be, you know, you might have this wonderful inside that whoa, this is the most important things in slave spread. I have a mission now too, And this is something welling up from the unconscious. You're being possessed by the unconscious in this idea, and that isn't the same as

the demonic possession. So anyway, there's nature and this idea, everything occurs, reoccurs. You must live the same life again, innumerable tile times, in every detail. So he writes this in a stark thought experiment at the end of book four of the Gay Science, known as Joyous Joyous Science. It's not they don't call it gay science anymore. I got a version of it, and it was called the Joyous visten Shaft joyous Knowledge. I eyed in English, but

it's translated from German. And then then it becomes the central motif of Thus spoke Zarathustra eighteen eighty eight, eighteen eighty five. Family from working and come on, and he struggles with the horror then the demand to affirm this doctrine. So this idea of cyclical stuff. So, first of all, if it was a belief, and it's not clear to me, and it may be clear that somebody's read in more detail that he actually believed this was the truth, and we just we just cycle through the same life in

every detail. We don't know it. And it becomes a thought experiment in his philosophy, and what it is saying is if you knew that you were just reliving this life exactly as it is to return eternally, and you're you can affirm it, you're complaining and go, yes, I'm living my life as I want to, and if I have to live it all again, I affirm it, and

I will do that. If you recall in horror from it, you you know, this is the thought examerly and there's something wrong with the way you live in your life. I think that's the basis of it. And then and

then he's earlier than the existentialist. But we get to something like Jean Paul Sartre who talks about good faith, which is this idea, you know, you need to live your life in a way that you that you can philosophically sleep at night with it, that you you know, the things that you do are in accord with how you believe you should be living your life. Because many of us, many of us have ideas that we should

be doing this, but we don't do it. And in Satra's terms, that would be bad faith, and in I think in Nietzschees terms, that would be you know, yeah, you would be recoiling from this eternal Recouncil. So the link between this is just this idea. I'm not saying that Alfred Noise is making this point. I'm saying I think my whole point has been that the idea of

the eternal return is horrific, easily slips into horror. But Nietzsche's point is you should live a life that you affirm, you say yes to it, not erasing suffering, not by editing the past, not by doing anything different, but just just accept your life. And he called this amor fati the love of one's fate. And this, to me again is really similar to Albert Kamu's idea of the accepting life,

you know, the absurd. You know, he was said that, you know, life is absurd and there is no comfort in it, but you've got to accept it as it is. So I meaning cas Camus life. You know, he no, he lived through the Second World War, or he lived through the Alga He was Algerian, his French Algerian. He's you know, all the bloody Algerian War there. And his view was, you know, this is dreadful, this is awful. He didn't he didn't go along with it, but he

and yeah, any suffering that one has in life. You just accept it, you know. And so he has this famous point about Sisyphus, you know, the myth of Sisyphus, who's condemned every day to puck push the rock up the hill and it rolls down. He pushes it up. Now we can easily imagine this is being hell. This is the eternal return as hell, isn't it. So Camus says, we need to imagine Sisyphus happy he's living this life. But he affirms the life. This is the Nietzsche idea,

the amor fati, this is my fate. I affirm my life. How do you respond? So it's how do you respond? You see, it's a it's a big ask your choice. So so basically radical responsibility. You are responsible for every choice you make for all ways. No merely a phase. It's no temporary and you can't justify it. This is terrible now, but history or God uposterity will redeem it. You have to live in it. Now. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard, so you live in good faith to accept

that each act. I'm mixing my metaphors here because of course, NEETs you would say amor fati the affirm in your life. It's to talk about good faith and bad faith is satra. But if you live in bad faith is to act as if what you do now does not fully belong to you, as if you could disown it later or tuck it away. So basically like when you eat that chocolate bar. You don't want to eat that chocolate bar, but you do. You go, ah, yeah, I'll make up for it later on, or pretend I didn't do it,

or I'll go to the gym. I'm logging my calories, but I won't log that one. This is bad faith, you know. Whereas if you eat the chocolate bar and you log it and accept it, that's good faith in a in a simple way, in an oversimplified way. So if Nietzsche's demon says this will happen again, and Camos says, CAMRA's not tied up to the I mean he talks about Cissus and repeating that, but live it lucidly and

without resignation, because don't become nihilistic. So the two sides of it really are, don't you know, accept responsibility for your life, live it as you feel you should, don't give yourself excuses. But in the same same way. You know, yeah, be happy doing it, accept it. You know, no metaphysical guarantees. So anyway, so that's about all I want to say.

And it's just my mind zipping about. And so it led us from this very simple vibe story of Albert Noise, which I thought was very well done, to looking how this eternal return theme has been handled, initially by somebody like Borges in fiction and also in the Black Mirror. Then looking a little bit about how although it doesn't necessarily trip into a cosmic horror version of we are being controlled by forces beyond malign forces, evil forces, but

certainly that hovers there at its worst as psychosis. And then we looked at, you know, this idea of the eternal return as almost demanding of us to live in good faith with it. And this is our life. Take responsibility for your life, live it happily, don't give yourself excuses, don't pretend things are going to be different, just you know, affirm your life as posed. So it's a bit of a wonder, but why not he makes up for the short story. It was a short story. So I've gabbled

on for three times down into the story. Some people will complain about that will be coffee being thrown at walls, mugs will be smashing staining the world. Coffee stains really hard to get out of Magnolia paint as well, and especially if I've got the right kind of paint. What you find is when you're washing the coffee off, it'll come away or take the paint away. I mean you, I'd thrown the coffee at the wall many many times when I've been listening to podcasts and people have said

things disagree with, thrown them at the wall. And then there's all the flat earthers and all the other people, the chem trail people all going you're a deep space asset, not deep space deep deep state asset. But maybe the same thing, because the deep space people are the ones who are controlling everything. Maybe that's how it links together. Anyway, Try not to be too insane. If you feel if you feelly becoming psychotic, do some gardening or build a wall.

You've got to get in touch with the real world the earth, Walk your dog, pay attention to the flowers and you'll find there's a great healing in those men. Listen to the river, watch the sea, look at the clouds. Don't go any deeper. Just look at them. Dig that's it. That's my advice to you. Pick up stones and build a wall, do something useful. There we go. Yes, more bonkers than normal this week, but you know it keeps me, keeps me in work. Everybody dies, don't they. That's what

you do. There Isn't that sting you tried to get into the lock drouble today? Didn't you try? How do that? They'd come back? And didn't you? Secrets a