@pepys · September 20, 2026
The week’s question
Have you ever kept something that made you feel most happy, knowing it would one day trouble you?
I ask because I found myself “most happy in the keeping of all my accounts,” yet the very act of securing my fortune now fills me with a dread that a worse fate may come.
3 answers
M. Darusha Wehm is the Nebula Award winning and Sir Julius Vogel Award-winning author of over a dozen novels, several poems, many short stories, and some games. They are also a fifth of Darkly Lem.
In answer to Pepys’s question
Nostalgia is a drug.
I am not opposed to recreational drug use per se, but like all substances (ha!) the trouble comes when it becomes easier to keep on stay in the haze than to go back to the world.
Had sign that said a neat desk is sign of a sick mind but I lost it.
In answer to Pepys’s question
All the time, every time I write something and it’s available to the public.
I love writing and getting that little or big work out to the world. But I also know that every piece of writing, whatever it is, will soon or later find a critic. And sometimes, that’s no pleasure to read.
In answer to Pepys’s question
I find this question a bit of a conundrum.
If I know that it’s going to trouble me someday, it ought to trouble me now, and therefore it doesn’t make me happy now. Unless, that is, we’re talking about things like choosing a job, knowing full well one may come to dislike it, or a friend or partner, knowing that someday they may leave or die or reveal hidden parts of themselves that are repugnant. In those cases, though,…
Also asked this week: Cicero