The Secret Fate of All Life

True Detective 1×5

& Dewall: I ain’t go no use for it or your money.
    Rust: What, money don’t spend?
    Dewall: I can see your soul at the edges of your eyes. It’s corrosive, like acid. You got a demon, little man, and I don’t like your face. It makes me want to do things to it.

& Rust: Look. You want my help? Just show me the rest of the file.
    Det. Papania: Why are you so hot to see the new discovery file, man?
    Rust: Well, why are y’all... so hot to not give it to me? It’s supposed to be like a consultation, right?

& Ledoux: The black stars rise...

& Ledoux: I saw you in my dream. You’re in Carcosa now with me. He sees you. You’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle.
    Rust: Listen, Nietzsche. Shut the fuck up.

& Rust: I can say that I walked away from the experience with a greater respect for the sanctity of human life.

& Rust: Why should I live in history, huh? Fuck, I don’t want to know anything anymore. This is a world where nothing is solved. Someone once told me, “Time is a flat circle.” Everything we’ve ever done or will do we’re gonna do over and over and over again... and that little boy and that little girl, they’re gonna be in that room again... and again... and again... forever.

---

& Rust: Look. Everybody knows there’s something wrong with them. They just don’t know what it is. Everybody wants confession. Everybody wants some cathartic narrative for it, the guilty especially... Oh, but everybody is guilty.

& Marty: You know the good years when you’re in them, or you just wait for them until you get ass cancer and realize that the good years came and went? Because there’s a feeling— you might notice it sometimes— this feeling like life has slipped through your fingers... like the future is behind you, like it’s always been behind you.

& Marty: Solution to my whole life was right under my nose— that woman, those kids— and I was watching everything else. See, infidelity is one kind of sin, but my true failure was inattention.

& Det. Gilbough: Tell us what you know about his girl... You know what happened there between them?
    Marty: What always happens between men and women? Reality.

& Marty: ...in states of undress, you know... like fucking.

& Rust: You ever heard of something called the M-brane theory, detectives?.. It’s like in this universe, we process time linearly forward... but outside of our spacetime, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn’t exist, and from that vantage, could we attain it... we’d see... our spacetime would look flattened, like a single sculpture with matter in a superposition of every place it ever occupied, our sentience just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See, everything outside our dimension... that’s eternity, eternity looking down on us. Now, to us, it’s a sphere, but to them... it’s a circle.

& Rust: In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill... and you are reborn but into the same life that you’ve always been born into.
    I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can’t remember your lives, you can’t change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life.
    You’re trapped... by that nightmare you keep waking up into.


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