# Finis et principium

By [~habsul-rignyr](https://paragraph.com/@habsul-rignyr) · 2022-12-11

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### Entrée

Prompted by _Certain Churnings of the Gyre_ to place [The Stack](https://soundcloud.com/user-628294386) in suspended animation for the foreseeable, _Yr Esteemed Humble, &c_ found Himself without outlet and therefore without moor, limping across the strait like a rudderless galley. For were ever two _bonhommes_ fitter to purpose than friend Habsul and friend Libhut when pouring affable conference into the porches of your ears? Or man more in Nature than when Goodman Habsul invoked the Muses?

I shall tell you, **sirrahs**, that fame hath its burdens as well as its privileges, for though the Orient was to Habsul but commorancy, to the Mandarin it is his domain. When their parish lords placed rings upon my hands and bracelets upon my wrists, Beijing grew jealous. When their young men began pledging fealty, they were gripped by martial fear. And when Habsul stopped at the temple to wash his feet, and trains of virgin girls offered up their locks like rags, (not a few who were refused later cast themselves into the boiling _Yangtze)_, lo was their manhood held in discredit. Thus did they so militate against us with repeated imprisonment, and _Latency_, and other base and unmanly methods that we were left withal but unhappiness in the Cause and good Habsul decided to sell his possessions--including the means of The Stack--and decamp.

And so ends, for now, _the Greatest Podcast in the History of Urbit_.

Undone by _the Peril_ but never finished! Yr Captain--being in **eloquence** a _Sinon_, for **policy** a very _Ulysse,_ in **aspect** _Adon,_ and possessing the **humility** of _Philemon_\--stored up his treasures neither like Ali Pasha, among the Greeks, nor in Heaven, where according to the Good Book they be safe from moths and the Irish, but in himself--in blood and flesh--thereby making his wealth as portable as a cryptographic key. Is not a man a consistory of coffers? And is he not more rich than _Darius_ who fills each spiritual niche with some excellence? Where the _layettier_ fashions his traps of beech, noble men build in their breasts the haggard house, to have a harrier-heart that speeds like a dart to its object; where builds the one his _chauff’rettes_ of glowing embers, the other hangs a mantle high in his inwit to guide him, following no lamp besides. In like fashion did Habsul take his passage and mew it in his bosom, and lifting himself from the beakhead fastened a light from his bowsprit. And now that ship, the ~habsul-rignyr, which seemed destined for wrack, was turned about and given a new heading: **the Network State**.

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### Helicons, come forth!

_O Muses of the internet! descend_

_from your sculptured alabaster porches,_

_where a hundred million Mercuries attend._

_Prometheus-like cast down your torches,_

_that they should fall to liven up the stage,_

_where tread_ **_we spirits of the network age_**_._

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*Originally published on [~habsul-rignyr](https://paragraph.com/@habsul-rignyr/finis-et-principium)*