NotGraphs: A Valedictory Statement

In his collection of aphorisms The Trouble with Being Born — a text from which the present author has quoted with embarrassing frequency in the most recent episodes of FanGraphs Audio featuring Dayn Perry — Romanian philosopher/misanthrope Emil Cioran ejaculates the following, apropos little besides the troublesome burden of existence:

My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.

With horror, is one reasonable way of reacting to Cioran’s declaration — horror that a man might exterminate his own issue based merely on a foreboding sense of the future. Considerable delight, however, is the more appropriate sensation — delight at the ecstatic dimensions of Cioran’s rampant pessimism (while also recognizing that people really, definitely shouldn’t kill babies).

What the current post represents is the final one ever to appear at NotGraphs. For those who’ve enjoyed the site — and there are more of those sorts than I would have expected — its end might be cause for horror or something like horror. As is the case with Cioran’s sentiment, however, the more appropriate reaction is delight.

Mike Bates and Robert Baumann and David Temple and Navin Vaswani have all enumerated the site’s virtues more ably than I could. I thank their dumb, absurd faces for that. Now what we have, with the death of the site, is the liberating pleasure that attends the end of a thing. Not the end of a child, mind you — because that would represent an offense very punishable by law — but of a thing that wasn’t terrible and somehow remained not terrible until the end.

Thank you, everyone, for making the constantly poor decision to visit this site. Consider making more of those (i.e. poor decisions) by means of visiting Banknotes Industries.