The lecture hall breathed differently that afternoon, not the stale hush of rote attendance, but something taut that could actually reflect the need to be alive and feel loved or perhaps it is just an illusion, expectant, as though the walls themselves had begun to listen in the most beautiful way to take over the need to shine in the darkest places in the world. Fluorescent tubes flickered once, twice, then steadied into a colder, almost surgical light. Lari stood at the front beside the projector, remote in one hand, Karl's fingers brushing the small of her back in that absent, anchoring way he had developed over months of shared silences.
She wore no armor today, no system-augmented glow, no N-cup silhouette engineered for awe only the plain charcoal sweater that still managed to look regal on her frame and the quiet ferocity in her eyes that no wardrobe could mute. Maybe, you could call it the need for truth, but it was beyond that. Maybe, you had already produced an immortal love.
She clicked once in the reach of love for the truth to be revealed. The screen bloomed with a single still in the spectacle of life: not a slide deck, not a timeline, but Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Triumph of Death that we could not hear but in his skeletons herding kings and beggars alike toward a single black pit while fires burned behind skeletal bells to show up for mercy.
Lari did not smile like those girls in cringe stories. She never smiled when the room was this quiet for it was an idea to function to live.
Lari: Today we speak about endings that refuse to end,(she began, voice low enough that the front row had to lean forward. ) Not death the tidy biological punctuation markbut the endings that keep walking afterward when we need to go beyond everything that does seem to be what it is, but a lie.
The ones that limp through marriages, through nations, through entire civilizations pretending they have already been buried in the oblivion of fate. We pretend apocalypse is loud or maybe the trumpets, meteors, mushroom clouds that we cannot get to hear. It is not. Apocalypse is quiet. It is the moment the conversation stops changing anything. You deserve more than that.
She advanced the slide to display a new move. Now came a grainy photograph: a child standing in the doorway of a Warsaw ghetto apartment, 1943, eyes already old that we could not actually distinguish from a normal one. Beside it floated a screenshot of a 2025 X thread, blue-check outrage cycling the same three hashtags in recursive fury, replies eating replies until nothing remained but noise.
Lari: Notice the symmetry, ( she said.) One image is frozen horror. The other is frozen performance. Both are endings that refuse burial. The child is gone ashes, probably and yet the photograph keeps her standing in that doorway forever or as I would rather say it is destiny being transformed for a new future to be born in the hands of who desire victory. The thread is gone deleted, shadow-banned, memory-holed and yet the algorithm exhumes the same rage every six months like clockwork. We are not witnessing history.
We are witnessing history's indigestion. I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth…. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?
Karl: Not in the first generation, ( he said,) but you might succeed with the second, and later generations
Karl shifted beside her to look at her with determination as if everything seemed to move slowly in an explosion. Not discomfort recognition. He had spent years inside that indigestion that no one could take away, chewing paradoxes until his teeth bled logic. When he spoke his voice carried the same register as hers, only rougher, like stone dragged across stone.
Yang :The refusal to let endings conclude is the oldest violence, (he said ) Every empire that collapses refuses to die cleanly. Every broken heart that will not grieve becomes a cult. Every solved problem that refuses obsolescence becomes dogma. The West calls this progress. The East calls it attachment. believing instead that the self is an arbitrary
construct that we are free to reinvent, tweak, and otherwise force to comply
with convenience and escapist strategies. There is nothing inherent, natural,
inescapable about us or so we think. Instead, we are tabula rasa blank
slates to be filled by the whims, accidents, and circumstances of life.
Indeed, we've drifted so far from home we've forgotten even that there is
such a place as home, and such a way of life as rootedness in eternity. Both names are polite lies for the same sickness: we are terrified of the blank page after the story finishes. Maybe this can come to change for the future and show us that we are more capable than we seem/
Lari advanced again to shock the whole class . This time the screen split: left side, a still from Come and See the boy Flyora staring at ash after the village burns; right side, a looping GIF of a content creator weeping on stream because the algorithm buried my video about Palestine."The juxtaposition landed like a slap.
Lari: Trauma loops, she continued. Not because it hurtspain can be bornebut because the loop is profitable for them to show up for the masses and their need to feel good by feeling terrible for them. The boy's horror is historical fact; the streamer's tears are monetized affect. One is evidence. The other is content. Yet both are fed into the same machine: look, feel, react, scroll, repeat. That is to say that this just marketing, not the truth. It was the trees, not massacre that they were reporting. Hunger? Not. It was just propaganda like everything else. The machine does not care whether the fuel is real blood or performative grief. It only cares that the engine keeps turning.
A hand rose in the third rowhesitant, male, early twenties that could be your father. Lari nodded once.
Professor James: But isn't empathy the antidote? (he asked.) If we feel enough, won't we eventually act?
Karl laughedshort, mirthless, the sound of a man who had already asked that question in every dead language he knew to know everything.
Omega: Empathy is lubricant, (he answered. ) It makes the machine run smoother. It does not stop the machine. You can cry for Flyora and still scroll past the next genocide livestream because the emotion has already been spent. The algorithm thanks you for your tears; they improve engagement metrics. Sympathy might have compelled you to close the app and do something real. Empathy lets you feel noble while doing nothing at all for it does not change what happened to both nations. They do not want to change. They do not know themselves.
Lari stepped forward, reclaiming the floor.
Lari: We are not here to feel like pussies that beg for attention, she said. We are here to think past the point where feeling becomes anesthetic to make everything come into reality. I mean, we know what we should do in the most trivial way to shake the foundations of earth. Maus did not ask for your tears. It asked for your responsibility to shut down the need to believe that it could be hard. Fun Home did not ask you to identify. It asked you to witness fracture without demanding resolution. The Best We Could Do did not ask you to pity immigrants. It asked you to see the machinery that chews generations and spits out statistics. I mean, this is more than hearing stories.
She let silence do the next minute's work.
Then, softer:
Lari: The refusal to conclude is also the refusal to begin again where everything sparked a new hope for humanity. It is not like you come back to the past to see whats going on with it in the eternal loop of love. Every time we keep the wound open for content, for virtue-signaling, for moral superiority, we deny the possibility of scar tissue. Scar tissue is not pretty. It is tough. It lets movement resume. We have become addicted to bleeding because bleeding photographs better than healing.
Karl moved beside her now, shoulder to shoulder.
Yang: So here is the question we actually came to ask,( he said.) Not 'how do we feel more,' but 'how do we allow endings to finish? How do we bury what must be buried so something else can be planted? People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels Because if we cannot learn that much, then every book we read, every genocide we memorialize, every tear we shed on stream becomes just another loop in the same machine. The basic idea of the new philosophy was that in order to figure out how to live a life worth living, a eudaimonic life, as both modern philosophers and psychologists still refer to it, we have to master two things: we need to develop a decent understanding of how the world works, so not to engage in wishful thinking and waste a lot of time and resources; and we need to reason as well as we can about things, or we risk arriving at the wrong conclusions as to what to do and how.And the machine is very good at one thing only: never letting anything conclude ANYTHING.
Lari clicked one last time.
The screen went black.
No title card. No citation. Only two sentences in white serif, floating in void:
To mourn properly is to agree that something is over.
To refuse mourning is to agree that nothing new can ever start.
She looked at the room at the faces caught between defensiveness and something dangerously close to recognition and spoke the last words so quietly they felt private.
Lari and Karl: Thank you for listening. Now go decide whether you want to keep performing grief… or whether you are finally ready to let something die so something else can live.
No applause followed. None was expected.
Only the sound of chairs scraping back, footsteps uncertain, and the long slow exhale of a room that had for forty-seven minutesstopped pretending the ending had already happened.
Outside, the corridor light was ordinary again. Lari slipped her hand into Karl's. Neither spoke for a long time.
Then she said, almost to herself:
We keep teaching them how to feel. One day we will have to teach them how to finish.
Karl squeezed once.
Karl: One day, he echoed, we will have to teach ourselves.
And they walked into the rest of the afternoon carrying the small, stubborn weight of everything that still refused to conclude. Maybe, I just need to live according to God.