I swear, the
word "ennui" (pronounced "ON-WEE", just in case you've never
heard it spoken) was actually
invented to denote this
stage of soul sickness.
Weird, huh?
Some
scholars argue that Ennui is the true
death of the soul; others say it is only the
usually-fatal stage of
disease and that souls can even be
pulled from this brink. I'm not a
scholar, so don't ask me.
Ennui is what happens when the
soul loses
radio communication with
itself, or with
THE self, if that helps you
think about it. The reason it is
deadly is because a soul can't heal what it can't find; namely, itself. Ennui is a
sick soul become
so sick that it can't even
fix itself, which is a powerful statement to make about something which is
undoubtedly one of the most
powerful forces known to mankind.
It may be (and
hopefully is) hard to imagine what it's like to
lose yourself to that extent; to the point where you can't
feel yourself; can't get
contact even
within your own mind. We're talking about
people who are no longer
people; they are no longer
attached to a soul. They
wander blankly like people
lost in the Arctic, unable to
understand even what THEY'RE doing and
why, unable to
empathize even with
themselves. It is
scary and
very not cool. People who
run into folks this sick will usually
run away--very fast. We can
tell when something is THAT wrong, no matter
how stupid we are on the outside. A
soul knows a
dying soul when it sees it, and a dying soul is
against Nature (assuming that souls are
eternal, which there is
evidence to support).
Ennui can lead to
suicide and often does. It can also lead to
severe psychosis--how do you keep
tabs on Reality when you can't keep tabs on you? Now, I'm no more an
expert in the Afterlife than you are, but it worries me to think what might happen, if we
die in that
state...where would you go, if you couldn't get a
bead on your soul, out there in the
bodiless places? Would you
forever be a
"Lost Soul"?
Anyway, that's the
end of the Soul Sicknesses, or at least the
end of the
basics about Soul Sicknesses. I would
node the rest of what I've found, but dammit, if I'm going to
write a book I'd damn well better
get paid for it!