2003-04-08 - 5:47 p.m.

Because it's been a while:

Trighorn Vent (1788-1880)

Possibly the dourest man ever to have lived, Trighorn Vent gave the first signs that he was to become a philosopher over breakfast with his well-to-do family in Leipzig on the morning of his eighteenth birthday. �How do you feel today Trighorn?� asked his mother. �Like a clenched fist,� replied Vent, immediately spitting out his sausage and retiring to his room for three and a half years.

His time was spent productively, analysing and documenting some eighty-seven individual types of misery and suffering, and even going so far as to characterise each one with its own despairing moan. So depressing was his subsequent presence that his parents physically confined him to the attic most days, though they did allow him to come down occasionally to converse with stubborn dinner guests.

Some years later he completed his first philosophical work, �Existence as an Interminable Annoyance�. Sales were poor, which gave Vent some temporary encouragement, though his thoughts quickly returned to the themes of his book. These largely centred around the idea that life was �no more than the phantasmagoria of an evil and unrelentingly short-tempered God, to be endured as you would being slowly crushed to death by rusty lead weights.�

Needless to say, his oppressive pessimism didn�t encourage people to befriend him, and he spent most of his days thinking about the horror of daily living whilst walking besides the tracks on the Leipzig-Dresden railway. He often bobbled along on his knees in the hope that the cuts of the shale might inspire him to greater philosophical insight into the nature of futility, though mostly it just meant that passengers from passing dining carriages would throw bread rolls at his head.

As he approached middle age, Vent had unwillingly resigned himself to continued good health. He saw suicide as �a luxury bought with the currency of cowardice� and given that he had no choice but to go on living, he reasoned that he could at least take up as little physical space in the world as possible.

With the yearly allowance from his estate , he began to undergo voluntary surgery. Beginning with his vestigal organs, he began to have all non-essential parts of his body removed. Just before his limbs were whipped off, he wrote that �the less of me there is, the less of me has to endure the constant agony, the less time I have to spend gnashing my teeth at the emptiness of it all.� He was of course, speaking metaphorically, his teeth having been among the first things to go.

By age 42, he was little more than sparsely-housed digestive tract and a brain trapped in a featureless cranium. This display of utter philosophical conviction had a profound effect on his academic contemporaries, many of whom would visit him, praising his commitment, whilst thanking the lord that they themselves hadn�t turned into such psychopaths.

Vent had also gained a cult following of students, who were with him constantly, attending to his few needs. They were anxious for further philosophical instruction, and though of course none came, Vent did once emit a previously undocumented type of moan, causing frenzied speculation that he had conceived new type of misery.

It seemed fitting that Vent lived like this for an exasperating fifty years, though when he eventually died of dropsy, he looked to have a grin on his face, persuading almost all his followers that his theories were, after all, complete guff.

(c)pablo 2003