Carlo Schuster:
By the time this letter reaches you, I should have already left Vista.
I packed up everything I could still take with me these past two days. There were more books than I expected, so I could only take the most important ones. I donated the rest to the library, hoping they can preserve them properly.
As I write this letter, the streets outside my window are the same as always. I've seen this scene for half my life, and looking at it again today, every glance feels like the last.
As I had anticipated, from the moment the church decided to classify my case as blasphemy, my stay in Vista was short-lived, whether I left or died here.
I'm more than I expected to survive until today and leave in a dignified manner. I always thought that, given the church's style of doing things, I would probably be waiting for extradition in jail, or worse. I'm very fortunate to be able to pack my bags and leave the city on my own.
But when it came time to actually set off, I found that I wasn't as carefree as I had imagined.
Before leaving, I visited the railway station that was under construction. The elevated track had already been laid, and I saw the rails erected above the street, as well as the workers who were adjusting the steering mechanism of the trains. They said it would be open to traffic in a few months, but unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to make it.
When I first proposed the railcar project, my idea was to enable people in the city to travel faster, and to accumulate technical experience for future intercity railways, so that those rails would not only be erected above the streets, but could also be laid to more distant places.
The image of the train in motion in my mind was vague, only having an outline and direction, but now, it feels concrete.
I felt like I was already standing in a corner of the station, watching the workers line up and walk into the carriages. The stationmaster on the platform was blowing his whistle to urge them to hurry up, like herding livestock. After the carriage doors closed, the people inside were so crowded that there was no room to turn around. Their faces were pressed against the glass, and their expressions were not visible.
The train carriages were crammed with people, who were transported into factories that exploited their blood and sweat, and then transported out again, in a never-ending cycle, with time compressed into one train trip after another.
There are many visionary people in Vista, especially the businessmen. They certainly remember all the benefits I described to them, but they only picked out the parts that were most useful to them.
In their view, the real value of the railcar lies in its ability to transport workers from their cheap accommodations to the factory gates without disrupting their work hours or saving them the expense of building makeshift sheds.
Sometimes I wonder if things would be different if I talked to them more, explaining the workers' lives in more detail. But then I think, they only want to hear what they want to hear, and my ideas are just a shell for them to use.
Vista is changing so fast that sometimes I feel the city is growing in the direction I described, but upon closer inspection, it's never quite the way I envisioned it.
I've lived in Vista for thirty years, and in those thirty years, I don't know whether what I brought here has changed this place or just made certain things that were going to happen here happen a little faster.
At first, I thought it was the former. When I first arrived, I was young and thought there was still time. I thought that as long as I could share my ideas with others, someone would listen.
I spent a lot of time explaining those concepts to people. I'm neither a scientist nor an engineer; I can only provide a direction, a principle that I know. The specific research and experiments still need to be done by others.
Some people did listen, even some very important ones, but others, those who were equally important, had different ideas from me.
I have dealt with all sorts of people: scholars, businessmen, officials, and clergy. Some of them were genuinely well-intentioned, while others were purely motivated by self-interest.
I used to think a lot about why things turned out this way. Was it because some people were greedy enough, or because a decision was made at some point in time that went wrong? I spent a lot of time asking this question, but I gradually realized that the question itself was problematic.
Attributing everything to the malice of a particular person or group, and explaining problems through the lens of the evil in human nature, is indeed convenient and persuasive, but it doesn't solve the problem. Human nature certainly has a dark side—greed, shortsightedness, and selfishness—but the same human nature manifests itself differently in different environments, to varying degrees and in different directions.
I don't know if you've ever heard of " Cthulhu," but the concept should be quite famous in our hometown.
Before I came into this world, I was fascinated by these kinds of stories for a while. I found those indescribable monsters really interesting. They transcended human understanding, and human reason could not confine them. The indifference of the universe was embodied in a form, an indescribable horror, which gave me a strange sense of pleasure when I read them.
But after living here for thirty years, I have a different feeling about that fear.
Lovecraft wrote those stories stemming from the horrors of the unknown, the indifference of the universe, and the meaninglessness of human laws... The universe is indeed vast and cold, but it lies far above us, so distant that we are so insignificant before it that many people never even feel the indifference emanating from it in their entire lives.
But there is something very close to us, all around us, yet its full form is difficult to discern. It distorts those who touch it, making it hard to escape unscathed once one delves into it—like another, more intimate version of Cthulhu.
Its name is Order; it appears as a city, and it appears as a nation.
Everyone knows it exists; everyone can see its streets, its buildings, its crowds, and even shake hands with its agents, but how many people can describe an order itself?
I used to think that order was like a blueprint; as long as it was drawn clearly enough, the builders would construct it according to the blueprint. I used to believe that.
Later I discovered that order is more like a sea. The part above the surface is visible—streets, people, plans—all of which can be observed and described; it is the surface of order.
But what lies beneath the surface is dark and profound. Too many people think they are at the helm, that they are making the right decisions, and that their will can change the direction of the city. In the end, they are simply swept away by the tides of order itself, and those who are crushed by its waves often only realize at the last moment that they are drifting in a place they should not be.
Order is all around us; the streets we see every day are its form, the bells we hear are its sound, but neither is order itself. It is so close that anyone can reach out and touch it, yet so vast that no one can describe its entirety. Indescribable may be too absolute, but it is indeed so... indescribable.