[A response to the e-mail quoted in this post.]
Dear Edward,
Oh how your reply made my mind and heart sing. It's so exhilarating and enthralling to meet someone who has the capability to write. It also gives me joy to know you are curious about the human condition. Observing others is a favorite past time of mine, particularly while traveling. I admit to reading memoirs voraciously, though some may be considered less than intelligent.
Please tell me, who are some of your favorite authors? I personally love J.D. Salinger, William Blake (poet I know), Garrison Keillor, Alan Moore, Erma Bombeck (who never ceases to make me laugh), Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Chretien De Troyes, and Clive Barker. I read constantly and in the future hope to be a librarian. [Once], I worked at the [library] and would often hide in the shelves upstairs and read while I was supposed to be putting away books.
[omitted segment]
Please, share more about you. What makes your heart soar? What do you want to be when you grow up? Where is home for you?
Sincerely and utterly intrigued,
[Sagacious]
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[Sagacious],
The first sentence had the same effect on me as that which was expressed by it. It is exactly that sort of abandon which fosters and sustains this rare sense of childish freedom while frolicking through the mental landscapes I share in conversation.
I will note some dissimilarities between us: I possess no "higher" education; I graduated from a Catholic high school and received technical vocational training during my service in the Navy; I have settled in several, distant locations throughout the United States, but would not consider myself to be "travelled", much less "well travelled" - I have yet to leave this country. Since childhood, my imagination was the stage for my experiences, the canvas for the emotional portraits I painted and interacted with. Within the last year, I cleared the forest that I referenced in a years-old poem of mine - I'll paraphrase it "I sowed and nurtured this forest as it grew up around me, hiding from my view the world that I now so desperately seek."
It has been too long since I read frequently and well. "The Watchmen" is the last title I read; I was impressed. Before that was Orhan Pamuk, "My Name is Red" and "Snow;" Neil Gaiman, "American Gods;" William Goldman, "The Princess Bride," Dave Eggers, "You Shall Know Our Velocity!" and Tom McArthy with "Remainder." My favorite movies to date are "The Fountain" and "Adaptation."
Until recently, I found it odd that I have read as little as I have. I am sure that I've read a great deal more than the average American, but much less than I know my intellectual friends to have done. Rather than viewing this relatively meager exposure to published knowledge as a shortcoming, I take pride in and am granted confidence by the fact that I have forged my own understanding of what is. When I reached the climax of the urgency of my questioning of life and "it all," I meditated and sought out the most basic, irrefutable knowledge that I possess; upon finding it, I built and exposed with it a progressively complex understanding of the nature of existence and the relationships of its elements, including Creation and dimensionality, gravity and time, consciousness, morality and evolution, and perspective, and perspective, and perspective. I am granted a powerful sense of comfort by a discovery that I made since, one that I find it necessary to remain aware of while interacting in this sea of others: I am fallible. Knowing this, I seek to understand others rather than to judge or "correct;" I find that this mindset feels most natural.
I feel that only recently have I become balanced enough to read, to draw what I am able from others' portrayals. I intend to read the many books which I possess and have left unread. I intend to continue seeking until I find my true purpose in life. I would like to write; though a career in writing, as any other transition I might make, is not likely to provide me with an income comparable to that of my current employ. I would also like to act in meaningful movies, to be tapped as a creative source for television and movie plot and character creation and development, to be asked to interpret and predict the behavior of "psychopaths" - more than anything, I want to be a superhero and a much-needed fountain of philosophical simplicity. I expect never to be, and remain impatient to witness the change that I persistently sense is necessary despite my acknowledgment that my perspective is limited, infinitesimal in the midst of it all. I'm driven to a fate I have yet to identify. I would also be satisfied to stay this or some equally mundane course and patiently live out my life, rendering what good I can until its end.
More than anything, I want to be understood.
Drowsy Enough to Entertain Doubts Regarding My Ability to Continue Writing Coherently and Quite Contrite for this Asinine Sign-Off,
Edward
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