--Look around in a crowded afternoon tram and reflect whether you would allow a lottery to select one of the exhausted toilers as the one whom you put into this world. They pay no attention as one person gets off and two get on. The tram keeps rolling along.

Reading that, I paused and found that from my admittedly privileged point of view, the overlap between the time, place, and circumstances in which I would actually want to be born is vanishingly small. Of course, everything is relative, and through our instincts for survival and reproduction I would almost certainly find meaning and happiness even outside that narrow overlap. But if I were offered the choice between remaining unborn and taking that lottery, I think I would choose the former.

During the little time I spent experimenting with psychedelics, I remember being fascinated by enlightenment and ego-death. One of the book's more interesting threads is Ligotti's engagement with Buddhism through the lenses of Zapffe and Thomas Metzinger. Throughout the book, Ligotti argues that removing Zapffe's psychological defenses and exposing the illusory nature of the self, as described by Metzinger, does not reveal liberation but rather the full horror of existence. Where Buddhism interprets the dissolution of the ego as freedom from suffering, Ligotti suspects that mystical traditions merely provide a more sophisticated psychological adaptation--a refined form of Zapffe's anchoring or sublimation. Enlightenment, becoming just another strategy for making an unbearable reality psychologically bearable.

Ligotti also recounts Tolstoy's fable of the traveler, the dragon, and the mice. By the time I finished the book, I found myself feeling weak, yearning to lick the honey.

Ligotti is an decent stylist, so I'll end with my favorite passage, from the chapter The Cult of the Grinning Martyrs:

To lay it on the line, whatever thoughts may emerge from your deviant brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to hang on you, who are only "one of those people." So start pretending that you feel good enough for long enough, stop your complaining, and get back in line. If you are not as strong as Samson--that no-good suicide and slaughterer of Philistines--then get loaded to the gills and return to the trap. Keep your medicine cabinet and liquor cabinet well stocked, just like the rest of us. Come and join the party. No pessimists or depressives invited. Do you think we are morons? We know all about those complaints of yours. The only difference is that we have sense enough and feel good enough for long enough not to speak of them. Keep your powder dry and your pessimistic, nihilistic, and defeatist temperaments in check. Our shibboleth: "Up the Conspiracy and down with Consciousness."