Prosper's Demon

It’s a bizarre but widespread myth that only heroes have good qualities, and the only qualities heroes have are good; villains are, by definition, all bad. Bullshit.

We live in a miserable world, where the best we can honestly hope for is that one empty, meaningless day will follow another without things getting actively worse.

Memories are tricky; there’s what you remember, and what you think you remember, the editions and redactions of memory, the corrections and amendations and blundered readings and the whole apparatus criticus of the conscious mind trying to make bread out of soup.

Partly, he said, he enjoyed my company; it wasn’t often that he had a chance to talk to someone whose mind was so little cluttered with education or accepted opinions— (“You mean I’m stupid.” “Good heavens, no. Just ignorant.”)

Take the truly dreadful, evil men of history, slaughterers of nations in the name of some twisted ideal. Of necessity you must allow them to have had Faith (which moves mountains, and without which mere works are in vain) and Hope, Loyalty, and Self-Sacrifice in the Name of the Cause, and practically every other noble and glorious characteristic you can possibly think of, except for the small matter of being in the right. . .

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? “That’s like saying the cat’s cat is a dog.

And belief, like love and sleep, is something you can’t do anything about. You can’t make it come if you want it, and you can’t make it go if you don’t.

I told you that you wouldn't like me. I understand. It shows proper feeling. If you said to me: There's this man who is so callous and brutal that he doesn't give a damn about his fellow human beings, wouldn't shed a tear over the death of an innocent; would you care to meet this person, shake hands with him, maybe invite him into your home and have dinner with him? You're kidding, right. That hypothetical piece of shit is, of course, me.

He'd given that a lot of thought, he said, and then it suddenly came to him, out of the blue, like (his own smile) being shat on by a seagull.

He had proved beyond any reasonable doubt that gods and devils were simply myth and superstition, but deep in his unruly peasant heart ("My father was a village apothecary and my mother was a goatherd's daughter. Can you imagine?") he believed...And belief, like love and sleep, is something you can't do anything about. You can't make it come if you want it, and you can't make it go if you don't.

I have a feeling you aren't going to like me very much. That may be the only thing we'll have in common, so let's make the most of it. I do terrible things. I do them to my enemies, to my own side, to myself. In the process, I save a large number of strangers (on average, between five and ten a week) from the worst thing that can happen to a human being. I'd like to say that I do it because I've one of the good guys, but if I did that , you'd see right through me. And the nyou'd quote scripture at me: Render to no one evil for evil. Really? Even if they're they enemy? Even if They're not human? You decide. Not sure I can be bothered with it anymore.

Collaborations. (Good word. Two artists collaborate on a masterpiece. Traitors collaborate with the enemy.)

I can't see a thousand years into the future, I told Her, so I can't see the nasty, evil outcome. What I can see is Master Prosper's horse, which is going to be amazingly beautiful. And thousands and millions of people who haven't even been born yet will look at that horse and hear about how it was made, even though it was impossible, and maybe it'll give them that little extra bit of strength and hope they need to persevere with scrambling up this shit heap we call life. And—I don't know. I really can't imagine what you've got up your sleeve that's so incredibly bad and horrible that Prosper's horse wouldn't have been worth it. From our perspective, I mean.

belief, like love and sleep, is something you can’t do anything about. You can’t make it come if you want it, and you can’t make it go if you don’t.

I have an idea you aren’t going to like me very much. That may prove to be the only thing we’ll have in common, so let’s make the most of it. I do terrible things. I do them to my enemies, to my own side, to myself. In the process, I save a large number of strangers (on average, between five and ten a week) from the worst thing that can happen to a human being. I’d like to say I do it because I’m one of the good guys, but if I did that, you’d see right through me. And then you’d quote scripture at me: Render to no one evil for evil. Really? Even if they’re the enemy? Even if They’re not human? You decide. Not sure I can be bothered with it anymore.

I told you that you wouldn’t like me. I understand. It shows proper feeling. If you said to me: There’s this man who is so callous and brutal that he doesn’t give a damn about his fellow human beings, wouldn’t shed a tear over the death of an innocent; would you care to meet this person, shake hands with him, maybe invite him into your home and have dinner with him? You’re kidding, right. That hypothetical piece of shit is, of course, me. All my life—

After all, we're the same in so many things, it's our differences that matter.

Now, conceding that Prosper was at least 40 percent full of the stuff that makes roses grow, that still left quite a lot of sheer unparalleled genius.

better not to piss off this loathsome and troublesome man, just in case we need him one day. Which is why nobody is ever pleased to see me, and why I never have to buy my own drinks.

Granted, I told Her, that your grand design is undoubtedly something very nasty and bad, eventually, in the long term. But you're immortal and I'm not, so if I stop you now, you'll just wait till I'm dead and start all over again, so really, what's the point in me interfering?

There was a lot of Master Prosper. Quite how much of it was necessary, I wouldn’t care to say; maybe 60 percent, which was roughly the ratio of genius to bullshit that made up his mental and spiritual being, so probably about that.