We killed him on a Friday, when the birds had just begun to sing again. They will never forgive us. The trees won’t forgive us either. The leaves withered like a silly chicken embryo in a failed egg. The heavens were silent, but there was a murmur across the great plains. The prophet was right, after all. His words echoed from afar into the wilderness of the Valley of Ashes. They were as distressing as they were inescapable:
“But he had to die: he saw with eyes that saw everything; he saw man’s depths and ultimate grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness. His pity knew no shame: he crawled into my dirtiest nooks. His most curious, overobtrusive, overpitying one had to die. He always saw me: on such a witness I wanted to have revenge or not live myself. The god who saw everything, even man—this god had to die! Man cannot bear it that such a witness live.”
The eyes of Dr Eckleberg saw everything beneath the rusty frames. The stare was unbearable. Sartre was wrong. Staring into one another’s being doesn’t lead to a second life, but to a deeper death. Besides, we didn’t know that we didn’t stare, but that He stared at us. Like Dr Eckleberg’s eyes He stared at us, seeing down the abyss of despair that we are. A pile of corpses on the forest floor. Each staring into one another, but never beyond.
Death is contagious, silently killing everything in its path. We didn’t know that either:
“Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss
Silently and very fast”
God didn’t just die, we killed him. We killed him first thing in the morning, before anyone could see it. We didn’t kill Him in the night, so that we could have no excuse for getting the wrong guy. We killed him, but that wasn’t enough. We hanged him, but we hung with him, that we didn’t know. We didn’t expect that. We didn’t expect to die with him. Killing Him, we killed ourselves, but we didn’t notice. The dagger went through, but we went about our business. They pointed it out, but we didn’t care. The dagger is still there, it has a golden hilt. Soon it will be dark again. The birds refuse to budge. The light is fading, but we don’t care, for we have torches. The same torches we used last night. They are still with us. We, on the other hand, are not.
We hoped to find ourselves, but we didn’t. We thought we would possess ourselves, at last, at will. We hoped that joy would follow the deed, but there was only mourning. So we mourned. But only for a little while. If only we’d known.
biblonia 
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