Pleasure is a stern duty imposed on us by the world

The expression Pleasure is a stern duty imposed on us by the world is East Pyrites’s defining slogan: a paradox that recasts indulgence as obligation. It captures the city’s obsessive, almost puritanical commitment to pleasure and gives its culture of vice the language of duty.

Coinage and Setting

East Pyrites, Nevada, lies eighty-seven miles south of the radioactive ghost town once called Las Vegas, and three miles beneath it. The city is described as one of the world’s marvels, but its distinction rests on an uncompromising devotion to vice. In that setting, the slogan makes pleasure more than an available amusement: it presents pleasure as something the world requires.

Pleasure as Obligation

The phrase’s force comes from the tension between its terms. Pleasure suggests gratification freely pursued; stern duty suggests discipline and compulsion. By joining them, the slogan gives East Pyrites’s excess an austere, almost moral seriousness. The city’s pursuit of enjoyment is not portrayed as casual or occasional, but as an obsessive principle with the insistence of a creed.

Expression in Practice

The narrative places the slogan beside a revival of ancient fertility cults, treated in East Pyrites with deadly seriousness. When Joe Pareti steps out of the dropshaft on the seventieth underlevel, a mass sexual gathering is underway at the intersection of Dude Avenue and Gold Dust Boulevard: fifty male members of the Ishtar Boppers and ten women belonging to the Swingers of Cybele. Pareti avoids the scene. It looks like fun, but he does not want to help the Goo take him over. His refusal provides a contrast to the city’s governing slogan: pleasure may be framed as a universal duty there, yet Pareti experiences participation as a danger he must resist.