The Lankville Daily News

By Otis Nixon

Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. What say you, young lurker? Is there not a longing for immortality in your activity? To stalk among these fleeting affections—to watch them pass, like a large jungle cat fasting. You who dare to affront Nature!

Those very same fleeting affections, always out ahead of us or lagging behind, recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Do you not, young lurker, in your refusal to make contact with the object of your gaze, dabble in some dark art? Do you not extend the boundaries of feeling which depend on acknowledgement and attachment? The lurker knows that, by erasing this element of humanity, he becomes inhuman. Society calls him an outcast. ‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘but it is I who have cast you out.’

Our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment; I doubt whether any of us knows the meaning of lasting happiness. Yet we lurkers know what it is to suspend time by the rejection of worldly pleasures. The devil knows we are hungry but he doesn’t know that we are fed from a wellspring deeper than those at his command. We prowl in holy communion, invincible.

In the keenest pleasures of your ordinary Lankvillian, there is scarcely a single moment of which the heart could truthfully say: ‘Would that this moment could last for ever!’ And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state which leaves our hearts still empty and anxious, either regretting something that is past or desiring something that is yet to come?

But if there is a state where the soul can find a lurking-place secure enough (say, a hedge or small tree) or to establish itself (say, the back seat of car or underneath an upended wheelbarrow) and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.

Come, young lurker, I’ve much to tell you.

By Otis Nixon

Since the days of my youth I had fixed on the age of forty as the end of my efforts to succeed, the final term of my various ambitions. I had the firm intention, when I reached this age, of making no further effort to climb out of whatever situation I was in and of spending the rest of my life living from day to day with no thought for the future. I would give the entirety of my substance over to the lives of others. I would become one with them without their knowledge. If I reached the high bar I set for myself, I would disappear from the eyes of the world entirely, but not it from mine.

When the time came I carried out my plan without difficulty, and although my fortune at the time seemed to be on the point of changing permanently for the better, it was not only without regret but with real pleasure that I gave up these prospects.

In shaking off all these lures and vain hopes, I abandoned myself entirely to the nonchalant tranquility which has always been my dominant taste and most lasting inclination. I quitted the world and its vanities, I gave up all finery–no more sword, no more watch, no more shoeshines, no more daily applications of lotion, uncture and balm, but a simple pair of binoculars and a trusty leather duster–and what is more than all the rest, I uprooted from my heart the greed and covetousness which gave value to all I was leaving behind. I gave up the position I was then occupying, a position for which I was quite unsuited, and set myself to lurking, an occupation for which I had always had a distinct liking.

All the sharpest torments lose their sting if one can confidently expect a glorious recompense, and the certainty of this recompense was the principal fruit of my earlier meditations.

I write in the hope that other lurkers, solitary though we may be, find comfort in these very same meditations; indeed, that, in the lonely yet emotionally charged hours interceding the visual capture of our subjects, we may fix our minds in reflection; moreover, that such hours spent in solemn reflection return to us during the ecstatic moments of a marathon lurk, thereby adding a new subtle color to our palette. Dare I say we achieve the rank of artist?

A lurker is solitary by profession; he achieves higher ground (and on it meets his spiritual brethren) by this very same profession.

By Otis Nixon

Today there is more recollection than creation in the products of my imagination, a tepid languor saps all my faculties, the vital spirit is gradually dying down within me, my soul no longer flies up without effort from its decaying prison of flesh, and were it not for the hope of a state to which I aspire because I feel that it is mine by right, I should now live only in the past. The solitary lurker is an agent of the past; in his lurking, he embodies the past; this is the aspect from which society turns its head. Thus if I am to contemplate myself before my decline, I must go back several years to the time when, losing all hope for this life and finding no food left on earth for my soul, I gradually learnt to feed it on its own substance and seek all its nourishment in the act of lurking.

The country was still green and pleasant, but it was deserted and many of the leaves had fallen; everything gave an impression of solitude and impending winter. This picture evoked mixed feelings of gentle sadness which were too closely akin to my age and my experience for me not to make the comparison. I saw myself at the close of an innocent and unhappy life, with a soul still full of intense feelings and a mind still adorned with a few flowers, even if they were already blighted by sadness and withered by care. Alone and neglected, I could feel the approach of the first frosts and my failing imagination no longer filled my solitude with beings formed after the desires of my heart. Sighing I said to myself: What have I done in this world? I was created to live, and I am dying without having lived.

God is just; his will is that I should suffer, and he knows my innocence. That is what gives me confidence. My heart and my reason cry out that I shall not be disappointed. Let men and fate do their worst, we must learn to suffer in silence, everything will find its proper place in the end and sooner or later my turn will come.

Daytime is a curse. The sun its accomplice. I pray for dusk knowing all the while my prayers have no effect on the rotation of the heavenly spheres. Yet, I pray for the cloak of night; the cover under which I may lurk with my sordid memories. Away from their prying eyes; but not they mine.