Five Listicles You Must Read Before the End Times

Rowan Fortune (RTE)
Sep 8, 2018 · 4 min read

The Top Five Colours

When answering the Proust Questionnaire query as to his favourite colour, a man so famous every set of questions he answered would be immediately named after him—Parisian author Marcel Proust—responded, ‘The beauty is not in the colours, but in their harmony.’ This is a good reply, but unfortunately it’s hard to replicate so here are some of our favourite colours in a fairly witless list.

Purple

Once the unique prerogative of nobility under feudalism, purple remains that part of the great spectrum of things that can be seen that are still reserved exclusively for the aristocracy of our current political economy. It is now the official and trade marked colour of Jeff Bezos, a reminder of his divinely sanctioned right to rule over the rest of us as our supreme and only sovereign.

Red

This one should go without comment.

Blue

To be honest, what is there to say for blue? Even William H. Gass in his essay, On Being Blue, freely admitted that it ‘hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder, or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered with cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the deceptive brevity of red, the whine of green.’

Yellow

Perhaps it was Charlemagne’s favourite colour? We can but speculate.

The Colour out of Space

Described poignantly by American author H.P. Lovecraft, ‘This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space — a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.’

Top Three Places to Visit in Europe

The Doge’s Prison, Venice

There is much worthwhile seeing in the city of Venice, but at some point while you’re there I recommend taking a gander over the bridge of sighs and experience the disturbing incongruity of traversing from the opulence of the Doge’s Palace to the selfsame’s incarceration facility. It is a poignant and timely reminder that even utopia has a prison.

Victor Hugo Museum, Paris

During certain seemingly indeterminate times of the year, the Maison de Victor Hugo in the Place des Vosges opens up its proud collection of sketches by the author of The Man Who Laughs, the story of the torments of the disfigured but virtuous Gwynplaine. In a turn that could have been the plot of a Hugo novel, Gwynplaine would go on to inspire a popular comic book villain in the Batman franchise. These drawings convey something of the nightmarish cosmos Hugo perceived in a cruel and capricious nature, one that nonetheless hinted at a divine but inexplicable higher reality. The true mind behind the Joker conveys in simple depictions of the ocean a sense of pathos far more unfathomable and discomforting than any practical jest played on the caped crusader by his Jungian shadow.

Victor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, London

If you’re a fan of taxidermy, absinthe and arachnids, this place will seem weirdly and specifically catered to your tastes.

Listicles that Exist Only on the Dark Web & Can Never be Found

Four of the Best EM Cioran Quotes about God

This world was created from God’s fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.

Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

This Non-Sequitur Listicle Which Structurally Mirrors Your Own Descent into Madness

Just the sound of a droplet of summer rain rippling on the lake beneath which excalibur waits

A forgotten collected works of a pre-Mesopotamian author’s creation myths

This audio recording of Jakob Böhme’s The Signature of All Things read by Cormac McCarthy

Frithjof Schuon

Stop reading

Stop

Please

Why?

No… n…

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Rowan Fortune (RTE)

Written by

Utopian flâneur, writer and freelance editor. Rowan has been published by Envoi, the Tablet, Clarion and others. Also find me at https://rowantree-editing.uk

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