Reprise

He is paralyzed by fear.

He has just finished reciting the lyrics. Before that, he was working out. Before that, he was taking a walk down and up the hilly path in the back of his apartment. Before that, he ate. By now, all of these are more or less established routines. He struggles a little to keep it up every now and then, but by and large, these are established routines.

Now, he's back home. Now he's all alone, sitting in front of his computer. He's frozen in front of it, unable to type a single word.

He's been reading a lot lately. Bucky's life, Pepys' diary, and the Encyclopaedia Britanica of 1911. He's even made it to I. It didn't take as long as he thought it would; to make it to I. It's almost one-third! Unfortunately, the great BE does not say much about I. Of course, he'd expected as much.

But he hasn't been reading out of the desire to read. He's not that curious; not that eager to learn. He's certainly not entertained by the prosaic, somewhat archaic prose of these gigantic tomes. He really doesn't mind reading much, but to be fair, he doesn't much like reading, either. He reads out of a sense of duty -- again, not to learn nor to enrich oneself, as books often claim to be able to do. He reads very much out of boredom, and he's responsibility toward his boredom. He feels obligated to read, or to do something. He doesn't feel obligated to be active, to be productive, but he feels obligated to do something, anything.

He figgits with the mouse every now and then. He staires at the screen, watching the blinking cursor. It blinks. It blinks.

He has set the cursor to a thin, grey line -- as close to invisible as possible without actually being invisible -- because he doesn't like seeing the cursor. At the same time, he knows consciously that, subconsciously, he harbours the desire to alter all things the way he altered his cursor: he wants to be able to see everything, but just barely.

It is true that he reads these books with a grain of disdain, but it isn't the case that he truly despise the books he's chosen. As boring as they are, they are not without merit, and not without entertainment value if one approaches them with the proper sense of humour. Yet he is not prepared to approach with this sense of humour. He does not seek to be amused just as he does not seek to be educated. He has chosen his books deiberately to avoid being interested. He is, indeed, interested in terribly many things and he could really go without getting any more.

After some time, he begins to hear the blinking cursor. This always happens. Sometimes it sounds like the turning signals' clicks, sometime it's a high pitched frequency alternating on and off, sometimes he hears the tap of the keyboard on every blink, sometimes it's the sound of a train gliding slowly pass the station. Of course, cursors do not blink, but he always hears it after some time.

It's not so much that he has nothing to write. Rather, he is unable to write. There is so much he could write but so little he can write truly. He has nothing to share; he has nothing to say. He feels empty, hollow. He is deprived of the great uniting universal that is fear. He fears nothing, and he has nothing to fear. And that's what is so terrible.

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