This Was Supposed To Be A Monologue.

History is so saturated with the written word, it’s almost inescapable. Novelists, playwrights, poets, books, plays, poems. Everyone is at some point or another a writer, it doesn't matter of what. You’ve written something. It might have been your diary, a lyric for a song, a story about a fictional character. Your name.

Thus, history is equally filled with readers. Those who consume those words, be it written by themselves or others. They take in those words’s meaning, and they interpret them according to their perspective of what is, and isn't real. Their view of the world. And I think, no, I believe that if those who put words to paper throughout history saw what has become of their words, what has become of their work… They would leave hell an empty hall just to watch us stumble our way into the dark.

I do not claim to be some kind of enlightened intellectual. I would be fumbling into the pit right alongside everyone else, should the writers of our past be granted their will. I know this. However, I am gifted with just the right amount of wisdom and intelligence to guess why.

See, I love stories. Every single one, no matter the quality, the length, complexity or goal. Someone wanted to tell a story, and so we are left with their words. Those words have meaning, and I revere that meaning. That concept of putting events into words, and those words into ink. Words have power. And Power changes history. The problem is we’re just. Not. Listening!

Have you ever read a novel where the hero goes on an adventure to fight against an adversary that far outmatch them in nearly every capacity? This hero, who leaves their home for the first time, led by a mentor, with their closest friends in tow, as they traverse their world, gaining wisdom and experience along the way that lets them face their adversary at equal footing. By that time the hero has grown enough in power, both personal and social, that they often even defeat their adversary, and put an end to their plot. Then they return home, where they are welcomed back with celebrations and happy reunions.

Sure, along the way there were hardships and losses. Maybe the older mentor paid the ultimate price to give the hero a chance to escape certain death, or maybe the hero was betrayed by those they thought would forever be their closest friend. Regardless, by the end, the circle closes, and the story ends, leaving the reader only with the emotions of what they’ve experienced after the fact.

We call it the Monomyth, or The Hero’s Journey. A neat, step-by-step recipe of creating a compelling narrative from start to finish, all wrapped up in a nice bow. The Arthurian legend. The Lord of the Rings. Moby Dick. Harry Potter. Star Wars. Almost every single superhero you can think of. But it's also our own life.

So much about our society is steeped in these circular series of events, repeated ad infinitum through the actions and experiences of the everyday human. We are so familiar with it, we aren’t even aware of its existence most of the time. So why do we keep failing to realize how it literally spells our inevitable descent into hell?

History teaches us to learn from our mistakes. And we do, to an extent. A child learns to avoid touching fire, while their parents learn not to keep candles on the coffee table. The issue arises when humanity as a group fails to interpret this lesson at one point in the chain. The words are written down, eyes read them over and over, but across distance, time and interpretations, meanings can shift. They change. They affect the world differently from what their writer originally intended. The Hero’s Journey turns back upon itself, and reverts to a story of how one individual’s mistake can lead to far greater sorrow as a result.

A villain is born, and with them a tide of exponentially spreading misery and darkness. The words that once changed the world for the better now have changed the world for the worse. For that is the Power of something written. It changes the world.

It has happened before. It will happen again. It has been stopped before. It will be stopped again. Over and over, in a never ending circle where nothing changes but the actors and their stories. That is why our ancestors hate us. They hate our inability to see what is right in front of our faces. Our inability to change what is so obvious to those who wrote the words in the first place. How we keep making the same mistakes over and over, while the recipe is literally used to recreate and redistribute the answer to our problem. A problem we as readers still can’t even see.

To be fair, the writers couldn’t see it either at the time. Oppenheimer came the closest in my opinion, with Homer right behind him. Their differences were the reality of their stories and the distance of several thousand years. Had they had the perspective available to our modern world, I believe they might have come up with an actual solution. Too bad they’re both crying hateful tears over what  has been made of their legacies. What they wrote.

Others are with them too, cursing our ignorance while drowning at the bottom of dry lakebeds. Scores of novelists, playwrights and poets, buried in their books, plays and poems. Moses, Tolstoy and Dante. Franz Kafka. J.R.R. Tolkien. William Shakespeare.

Aesop.

Charles Dickens.

Edgar Allan Poe.

Plato.

Mark Twain.

Mary Shelley.

Jane Austen.

Asimov, Lovecraft, King, fucking Quentin Tarantino when he dies.

Oppenheimer and Homer. Their stories all try to tell us what happens once the Journey is over and the cycle begins anew. The events take on different costumes, but they are all still the same. Like I said, only the actors change. Sometimes a little. Sometimes… too much. Sometimes we get to see it happen right in front of our eyes. Other times we can only speculate what might take place beyond that last page.

In fiction it has a name. In reality it’s more symbolic. It often happens gradually, and then ramps up until what is occurring can no longer be ignored. As if the change itself tries to hide, knowing its revelation will be too much to bear for those it happens too. Yet, it inevitably happens to all who try to avoid it.

Odysseus fought it the hardest. His journey is one of the oldest after all, it should just be right he would be the one to push it away for as long as possible. Only, in doing so all he accomplished was to prolong the building tension, until eventually his actions caught up, and the recoil was so powerful it brought down all of modern society along with him. See, Odysseus never knew the monomyth, despite being part of one of the most famous ones. He couldn’t see the monster creeping up on him before it was too late. Before he’d successfully razed all of Troy to the ground, literally bathing its marble steps in the blood of its people.

You Either Die A Hero, Or Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain.

Jonathan Nolan wrote that line for his brother’s movie, The Dark Knight in 2008. I think Homer would have liked him. They saw a way out of the Hero’s Journey that the rest of us can only seem to feebly grasp at. They, like Oppenheimer, saw the possibilities of what could happen if we kept going around in circles for the rest of eternity. In Oppenheimer’s case, they saw the very atmosphere catch fire, reducing our planet to nothing but screams followed by silence. Oppenheimer even tried to stop it, but in the end he was just as powerless as the rest of us before the almighty written word. He followed orders, and finished his Hydrogen bomb. The second most powerful weapon made by man. Second only to the pen.

That’s why they hate us. And it is why, when our turn comes, Hell will be filled with nothing but empty rooms for us to fill, where we too, will hate those who read our words after our circle has closed. For we are novelists, playwrights and poets. We write books. We write plays. We write poems. And we write history. Movies. Music. Code. News, pamphlets, speeches, arguments, slander, lies, truths, theories, facts, mistakes and successes. And just like all those before us, we too, can’t find a way to break the circle. We can only watch as it endlessly closes before starting over, with new actors, writing our words, while we cry in hatred for the inescapable Written Word and its power. The Power to change the world, if only someone could draw a fucking line.

Written by

Leo Rebilis

15.09.2026 at 03:46 am.