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The Penance of Dorian Grey
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5/31/2008
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I am a long ocean away from cold London. I am far enough away from the harlots, the card games, the opium.
I am a lifetime away from the cobbles where I would murder and revel.
I awake, and find myself in America, where I never had travelled when I was young, and alive.
I have been given release, the most blasphemous of my deeds burnt off----though I still bear scars of the whips, and the machines.
This is my final task, they have said. oh, I stood before the his throne and saw him myself----he has been given the choice (has been given all the choices, it seems) to keep us or release us, as he sees fit. He only need release the souls one time, he may keep them all, until then. It seems he remembers that the quarrel is not with us-----and for all his refusals to obey, he talks grandly, expansively about redemption.
He told me he anticipated everything besides redemption, but that he would take the chance againa nd again, and redemption is the only thing that eludes him.
He thought I was an interesting case, being so known for blackness and dissolution. He thought I had been mislead by others in youth.
My task now is to find a way to reverse this docile self-love. The soft parts of luxury are always the most deadly. Murder is easily forgiven, as is idolatry, and blasphemy-----humans are stupiud,a nd weak, and these are easy traps for them. Solipsism, being eternally bound by one's own mind like being tied to an eternally spinning disk-----breaking this takes a strength, a strength that receives grace from the Eternal itself. Most fail.
My task would be to create what I once was, so long ago, from the infant wreckage that emerged from that place of punishment.
I come from Hell, and Hell is the direction to which I fly.
I have have been tasked with my own penance, removing the remnant of sin from my flesh, and restoring the beauty or youth, grace, and proportion given to me, so long ago, which I gave to others, let some others steal, and myself left out to decay in dirty air of sloth and dissolution.
Can I do this? If I cannot, I lose my freedom, and no intercessions of saints will save me, the Eternal is deaf to my pleas until They can recognize me, as I was created.
The Prince of Hell has given me a year, or he comes to take me back, where I will stay, punished for our shared vice, together, eternally.
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narcissus, purgatory, damnation, dorian grey, redemption
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