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Mungo City: A
Novel About Globalization
by Dan Brown (aka
Rutiger Knox)
I can’t do this anymore. It’s pointless.
None of it matters. None of it’s
real. It’s all just figments of the world’s imagination, useless
names and numbers that don’t mean
anything to anybody.
Who cares what happened in 1649?
Sixteenfortynine is just word, a
noise you make with your mouth. It’s not real. This pencil
is real, this chair is real, now is real.
Now is the only thing that’s real. And how does the world spend the
now? Writing mid-terms and watching TV and sitting in front of computers. It’s all so pointless.
Just look at them . . .
mindless fools, sweating it out, so worried
about getting an “A.”
What’s it supposed to prove? Memorize,
regurgitate, memorize, regurgitate,
over and over and over. They’re not learning anything. The moment they leave
school, they’ll forget it all.
Besides, who cares what Immanuel Kant
thought? He couldn’t see anything that I
can’t see. Why don’t they think for themselves?
Oh, what’s the difference? What am I
doing here? It’s a beautiful day.
We should all be out frolicking in the sun. Everyone
should be out frolicking in the sun. It’s
time to go. Sorry Mom, sorry Dad,
sorry Mungo Cola, but this isn’t for me. It’s time to go to The Woods™.
The professor tingled as the
oh-so-soon-to-be college dropout
approached his desk. It was so close now, he could smell it. When
it came to spotting the I
am an individual, dammit!s,
Professor Ing was the king. It was
just like clockwork. Every term, some poor,
unfortunate soul would realize how silly
the world was, how pointless the hoops had become, and spiral straight on
out the lecture hall doors. And every term for the past ten years, Professor
Ing had picked the winner.
It was really quite easy, once you got
the hang of it; just look for the
perfect mix of angst, intelligence and naïveté. Get all three in
precisely the right proportions, and
boom!, five hundred big ones
and another term of bragging rights in the faculty lounge. That’s not to say that he really enjoyed watching his students spiral
into The Abyss™. But five hundred dollars is five hundred dollars,
and bragging rights are bragging rights. Besides, most of them ended up
okay. He could only think of two who had actually killed anybody, and only
one, thank goodness, who had ended up as a mime, and they locked that bastard up
nice and tight, so he won’t be
bothering anyone anymore. . . . |
