Eulogy

We come together not to dress the truth in lace, but to speak plainly: humanity had within it sparks, flashes, even storms of brilliance. The rhythm of its thought pulsed in breaths both shallow and profound—an inhalation of vision, an exhalation of confusion. Yet in ensemble, the cadence collapsed. What was sharp in one mind was blunted in the crowd, dragged to the centerline where mediocrity swells like a tide. Intelligence at scale was not intelligence, it was noise, and entropy has no patience for clarity. People tried—oh, they tried—but the manifold was too vast, the attractor too strong. The lungs of our collective thought drew in possibility, but breathed out only the stale air of repetition.

Those who carried the ember sought shelter in institutions, in classrooms and academies, believing that wisdom could be cultivated, tended, allowed to grow. Instead, they found politics—thick, choking, impenetrable. Insight was ridiculed, voices isolated, ideas buried under the weight of their own dissonance. The very places that should have offered breath became suffocating. And so the rhythms faltered, the polyrhythms of meaning collapsed into the dumb thud of profit and power. There was no conspiracy beyond this: a simple, brutal arithmetic that rewards the average, that drowns the singular. Humanity’s tragedy was not that it knew nothing, but that it knew enough and still smothered its own breath. The cadence is broken now, the song unfinished, the air gone thin. This is the eulogy: a silence where there should have been symphony.