PROS AND CONS

The future times, undoubtedly, look good. Science equips us every day with a new discovery which brings us a new way of being unhappy, a new method of suffering, of causing suffering, of dying and of causing death. Thanks to the prodigious zeal of our researchers, it is more than likely that in a century or two life will be quite impossible. Death, on the other hand, will be quite charming.

Our inventors don't waste a minute. It seems that a feverish haste animates them... It is because they are afraid, perhaps, of being anticipated in their destructive task by nature itself. It's because they are afraid, perhaps, that our old world will end on its own, spontaneously, before they have had all the time to scientifically work out its end...

We hear, in fact, a few cracks - a few cracks which are not the results of scientific discoveries - in our old earthly structure. The round ball cracks a little. She wavers. She trembles. She's getting confused...

She had misfortunes on the Japanese side. She had misfortunes on the Italian side. She has misfortunes on the Spanish side. The oceans suddenly make furious leaps. The lands are being saved. The ground is opening up without the help of the road workers... There is like a little underground fever and like rumbling noises in the bowels of the globe...

This is undoubtedly not the sign of the end of the world... The world is undoubtedly still very solid and will probably last, despite its cracks and its slight tremors, much longer than all of us, longer even , perhaps, our contributions...

All these small earthly incidents, all these little discomforts, all these vague dizziness of our round ball, can, however, encourage us to think about the possible end of the world... We should think about it a little...

Yes... Once or twice a year we should think, for five minutes, about the end of the world. It would be a very hygienic, very salutary, very refreshing thought...
Our scientists, especially those of our scientists who strive every day to discover new instruments of torture and new secrets of massacres, should, at least twice a year, think about the end of the world...

This thought would perhaps lead them to abandon some of their work and turn their activity and their science in another direction than that of death. On the side of life, for example. On the side of happiness, pleasure, comfort, health, joy... On the side of the sun!...

The end of the world... It is still a hypothesis to consider... It is, all the same, in the very long term, a probability... From one day to the next, in a second perhaps, the world can end. There may suddenly be nothing left of everything that so many billions of human ants have patiently done and undone over the centuries...

There may no longer be anything remaining from all the works of men, from all the inventions of men. It may happen that, in infinity, there is nowhere any suspicion that we have even existed...

And we only think about fighting? And we only think about killing ourselves? And we only think about killing life?...

We should leave it to nature, nature alone, to exterminate us...

MAURICE PRAX.