That's why it's bullshit to say love doesn't matter because the lack of is the cause of most of all the bloody slaughterhouse the world is.
"It was due to a lack of love that he turned to the darkness."
Though those who seek to condemn us would like to dismiss this simple truth as nothing more than a bit of melodramatic pathos, it finds itself proven time and time again, doesn't it? It's one of those embarrassing instances of reality shattering humanity's happy collective dream, dragging the once happy visionary back into the world as it actually is. The contented don't rob driven to commit their crimes by the devils of envy, the pacific don't murder, the well-fed don't engage in petty acts of larceny for the sake of securing their next meal. The Christians assure us that pride is the greatest of sins, the well-spring of each and every wickedness but, at least in that, I'm afraid they may be mistaken. It's the far less majestic demons of Hunger and Want, the pangs that twist our bowels rather than our spirits, that drag angels from the Heavens and men from the Garden.
When it comes to the endless stream of nightmares mankind has sweated from its skin once the sun has set and it's closed its eyes, the figure of the wendigo is the one I've always found most terrifying. Of all of the demons we've conceived while consorting with our fears, this horrible creature has always struck me as the most unsettling because it's the one that bears our features most faithfully. Though the particulars are of course as varied as the men recounting them, what has always remained consistent was this particular monster's hunger. It was, and still remains, the elemental spirit of the harsh North where sustenance is in such conspicuous demand because there's so little of it to be found. The trees that bore fruit during the summer months have frozen and died, at least for a little while. The animals that could be hunted to satisfy our most basic needs have retreated into the depths of the Earth to sleep until the world becomes hospital again. The resources that allow us to satisfy our impulse to sustain ourselves have disappeared and, yet, said desire still remains. We want to eat but there's simply nothing to consume...well, not entirely nothing. There are the men and women starving alongside of us, aren't there? They have bones to be stripped if no other game is available, they have blood slightly more sweet than the bitter seas surrounding and isolating us waiting to be drawn and drank.
As we freeze in this wasteland, the spirit of the wendigo rises up and offers something of a Faustian deal. Perhaps far less sophisticated than the enticements offered by urbane Mephisto attempting to seduce a cynical
old magician, but infinitely more immediate and, by virtue of that, so much more tempting. What are the secrets that govern the cosmos compared to that next meal? What man, who's actually starving, would opt for the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil when an actual apple could provide him one moment more in mankind's amoral garden? Only an Adam and Eve, impossibly beautiful beings who had never known hunger, would be silly and spoiled enough to choose the former over the latter.
And so the serpent slithers in, only capable of doing so because the now-barren limbs of the Garden's trees have afforded its coils purchase. The dying man drags his gaze from the grave he's prepared for himself and finds the demon before him, just as grotesque and emaciated as the thing he glimpsed in the Garden's streams before the winter chill arrived and froze them. It extends its skeletal claw offering a repulsive truce, nothing more than a nauseating parody of life in exchange for being rescued from death, and smugly waits for the dying man to clasp its hand.
Some will, in extremis, do so. They'll become cannibals because moral wickedness is preferable to death, the most severe of all natural ills, and will be dealt with as all cannibals inevitably are. There are others who won't, of course. They'll refuse the bargain, resist the wendigo, and commend themselves to starvation.
And for their act of goodness they'll be rewarded by the huffs and puffs of the well-fed, annoyed by the fact that their feasts were disturbed by the agonized howls of the miserable things fated to die hungry beneath the horizon.
We, the things tormented by the wendigo, alone know what it means to be good for the sake of goodness itself.
