A Parable

In the dying days of the world, a man set out to make his place, seeking in the ways of trade or craft a noble pursuit equal to the nobility of man. But in his hometown he found none, for all was ignorance and complacency there, so he left the town by well-traveled roads laid in straight lines across the land until at last he came to a university.
At the university he found knowledge and information enough to encompass existence and even dare surpass it. The arched hallways, the broad stone plazas, the lofty towers rang with the grand declarations of students and professors alike, and the man learned from them the shape and form of the blight of the world, but not its cure, nor its end, for the blight was seeded in the core of all humankind, and eventually he came to see that knowledge devoured knowledge, that the mind too was slave to whim and caprice and alone could never undo the dark knot in the soul of the world.
The man left the university, traveling far by narrow paths and restless ways until he came to a foreign land wherein there dwelled a kind hearted people, and they welcomed him and drew him into their midst and for awhile put his mind at rest. But the land was beset with war and tyrants, and when they learned where he had come from, they shouted, Go back! Go back and save us if you truly love us, for the war upon us and the tyrants against us are the making of your very own country.
So the man left the foreign land and returned to his own even heavier of heart, and for awhile he drifted between different jobs and tiny rooms, and in his dreams he would see in a pleasant meadow the faces of his wife and children calling to him, and he would chase after them until he saw that the ground he stood on was barren beyond repair, and that they beckoned to him from across an impossible divide.
Years later, but still in the prime of his life, the man was passing through a mountain range when he came across a dead hawk in a glen of oak and fir. The man paused to contemplate the golden haired hawk, crumpled over a shattered wing. Its breast was pierced through with a bullet hole, but its eyes yet gleamed fiercely in the dusty light which slanted through the oak and fir. Suddenly a strange grief overtook the man, from where he did not know, and he buried the hawk in a shallow grave, mourning for a thing that unnamed and unknown had passed from out of creation when the idea of humankind was first conceived in its nightmarish womb.
The man made a lonely home of that glen and those mountains, never again venturing to the cities or towns below. Instead he passed his days watching banks of fog and clouds crawl over the landscape like shapeless monsters of forgetfulness and undoing come to return everything to the nothingness from which it sprang; and he lived ever thus, awaiting the day that he should break, or that the world should break before him.