Thoughts on Creativity

Two pieces I feel are worth passing along.

First, the inestimable John Cleese:

Second, this from screenwriter Shonda Rhimes via Zen Pencils (follow link for full size):

Her Unwelcome Inheritance Audio Book

Her Unwelcome Inheritance (Fayborn, #1) is now available in audio book format!

The production features lovely reading by Summer Jasmine Brown and is just under 6.5 hours long. It is available for $17 from iTunes and Amazon, or FREE with an Audible.com trial membership.





Here are the links:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LU1NLJU/

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/her-unwelcome-inheritance/id899281168

Audible: http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/B00LSW52I4


A limited number of complimentary copies are available for reviewers. If you're a book blogger, a goodreads or booklikes user, or professional reviewer, and you prefer audio book format, contact me here.

A Hasty Hypothesis of Curacy

(In 7 Tweets)

1/7 Ideas are humanity's only true wealth.

2/7 When constrained by language or locality, Ideas give rise ecosystematically to Culture.

3/7 Globalization forces Ideas and Cultures to compete for survival...

4/7 ...resulting in both “invasive exotic” and “endangered native” ideas just like we see with plants and animals.

5/7 Globalization therefore reduces cultural diversity, promotes homogenized thought, and impoverishes humanity.

6/7 Curacy is our best defense against Globalization (so far), but...

7/7 ...any theory or method of Curacy is inescapably informed by the curating culture and is already compromised.

8/7 Take all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum / then charge all the people a dollar and a half to see 'em...

Advice from Edith Wharton

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another, equally imperious, is that of fiercely guarding against it. 

In this respect, the novelist of the present day is in danger of being caught in a vicious circle, for the insatiable demand of quick production tends to keep him in a state of perpetual immaturity, and the ready acceptance of his wares encourages him to think that no time need be wasted in studying the past history of his art, or in speculating on its principles.

This conviction strengthens the belief that the so-called quality of "originality" may be impaired by too long brooding on one's theme and too close a commerce with the past; but the whole history of that past - in every domain of art - disproves this by what survives, and shows that every subject, to yield and to retain its full flavour, should be long carried in the mind, brooded upon, and fed with all the impressions and emotions which nourish its creator.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.

To know any one thing one must not only know something of a great many others, but also, as Matthew Arnold long since pointed out, a great deal more of one's immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly includes; and Mr. Kipling's "What should they know of England who only England know?" might be taken as the symbolic watchword of the creative artist.

One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the "fiction course" is getting the fiction it deserves. 

At any rate it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms.

But though the trade-wind in fiction undoubtedly drives many beginners along the line of least resistance, and holds them there, it is far from being the sole cause of the present quest for short-cuts in art.

There are writers indifferent to popular success, and even contemptuous of it, who sincerely believe that this line marks the path of the true vocation.

Many people assume that the artist receives, at the outset of his career, the mysterious sealed orders known as "Inspiration," and has only to let that sovereign impulse carry him where it will.

Inspiration does indeed come at the outset to every creator, but it comes most often as an infant, helpless, stumbling, inarticulate, to be taught and guided; and the beginner, during this time of training his gift, is as likely to misuse it as a young parent to make mistakes in teaching his first child.

There is no doubt that in this day of general "speeding up," the "inspirational" theory is seductive even to those who care nothing for easy triumphs.

No writer - especially at the beginning of his career - can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that awaits him; and the young novelist may ask of what use are experience and meditation, when his readers are so incapable of giving him either.

The answer is that he will never do his best till he ceases altogether to think of his readers (and his editor and his publisher) and begins to write, not for himself, but for that other self with whom the creative artist is always in mysterious correspondence, and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it.

As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination can make a little go a long way, provided it remains sufficiently long in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. 

One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels.

But they must have hearts that can break.

Even to the writer least concerned with popularity it is difficult, at first, to defend his personality.

Study and meditation contain their own perils. 

Counsellors intervene with contradictory advice and instances.

In such cases these counsellors are most often other people's novels: the great novels of the past, which haunt the beginner like a passion, and the works of his contemporaries, which pull him this way and that with too-persuasive hands.

His impulse, at first, will be either to shun them, to his own impoverishment, or to let his dawning individuality be lost in theirs; but gradually he will come to see that he must learn to listen to them, take all they can give, absorb it into himself, and then turn to his own task with the fixed resolve to see life only through his own eyes.

Even then another difficulty remains; the mysterious discrepancy which sometimes exists between a novelist's vision of life and his particular kind of talent.

Not infrequently an innate tendency to see things in large masses is combined with the technical inability to render them otherwise than separately, meticulously, on a small scale.

Perhaps more failures than one is aware of are due to this particular lack of proportion between the powers of vision and expression.

At any rate, it is the cause of some painful struggles and arid dissatisfactions; and the only remedy is resolutely to abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one's vision to one's pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.

Of twenty subjects that tempt the imagination (subjects one sees one's self doing, oh so wonderfully, if only one were Merimee or Maupassant, or Conrad or Mr. Kipling!) probably but one is "fit for the hand" of the limited person one happens to be; and to learn to renounce the others is a first step toward doing that particular one well.


-Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction

The Fayborn Reading List (to date)

Readers of my Fayborn novels know that the story begun by Her Unwelcome Inheritance is a story full of other stories. As my namesake character in the novel puts it, 

"The more stories I study, the more I become convinced that there is only one story; and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it."

 At the back of each Fayborn novel is a "Further Reading" Appendix. I included it both as a way to acknowledge the great storytellers and explorers of Faerie whose works have profoundly influenced my own, and as a way of introducing readers to those masters or helping them remember why certain phrases, people, and scenes in HUI and its sequels, The Eighth Square and the forthcoming A First or Final Mischief, may seem uncannily familiar.

Here is that reading list, so far. Titles are listed in the approximate order in which they are mentioned or otherwise referenced by the Fayborn books; titles by the same author are listed together only when referenced together.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare

Dracula, by Bram Stoker

The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis

The Magician's Nephew, by C. S. Lewis

Lilith, by George MacDonald

Grimm's Fairy Tales, by the Brothers Grimm

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

Stories from Times Past, by Charles Perrault

Just-So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling

The Princess Diaries, by Meg Cabot

The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spencer

Metamorphoses, by Ovid

The Odyssey, by Homer

The Prose Edda, by Snorri Sturluson

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis

The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien

A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J. K. Rowling

The Aeneid, by Virgil

Russian Fairy Tales, by Aleksandr Afanas'ev

In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, by John Gribbin

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame

The Willows in Winter, by William Horwood

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, by E. T. A. Hoffmann

The Stolen Child, by W. B. Yeats

The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter

Ben-Hur, by Lew Wallace

Tales from the Perilous Realm, by J. R. R. Tolkien

Nobel Lecture, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Book of Joshua, unknown author

Someplace to be Flying, by Charles de Lint

Tremendous Trifles, by G. K. Chesterton

Coraline, by Neil Gaiman

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, by T. S. Eliot

Historia Regum Brittaniae, by Geoffrey of Monmouth

Timaeus, by Plato

Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, by Wendell Berry

Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll

Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Anastasia Morningstar and the Crystal Butterfly, by H. J. Hutchins

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne

Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio

The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, and The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, by Beatrix Potter

Tales of Oakapple Wood, by Jenny Partridge

Works and Days, by Hesiod

One Thousand and One Nights (unknown author)

Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot

The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, by Thomas the Rhymer

The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis

Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, author unknown

Andersen's Fairytales, by Hans Christian Andersen

At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald

Virginia Folk Legends, edited by Thomas E. Barden

The Illiad, by Homer

Germelshausen, by Friedrich Gerstacker

The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., by Washington Irving

Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White

P.S. If this list resembles your bookshelf, nightstand, to-read list, curriculum, childhood favorites list, and/or wish list, why not give Her Unwelcome Inheritance a try? =)

Lunch Story

This one comes to the Smithy from my friend, fellow miscreant, and sometime roommate Aaron Roth. I deemed it worthy.

* * *


I had an interesting lunch today. Let me tell you about it.

I wanted to get the oil changed in my car so I went over to the Honda place near my office. I dropped the car off and walked to McD's which was just 100 feet up the hill a bit. I sat down ate my chicken Caesar salad and finished reading this academy of cognitive therapy newsletter. While that is interesting enough, it gets better.

I noticed an older gentlemen had taken up residence at the table near me and was eating by himself. I felt prompted to go and have a conversation with him because I feel like no one should eat alone. I didn't really want to, but like I said, I felt prompted.

I refilled my water and sat back down to grab my stuff and I walked over to his table and asked "Are you waiting for anyone?" He said "no," so I said "Do you mind if I join you?" He said "ok." He was concentrating on eating his food and so he wasn't responding much to my general questions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and I began to think this was a short-lived idea. After a few Richmond questions I did ask him if he went to church. He said "No. Why, are you Mormon?" I laughed cause I thought that was pretty funny. He then responded "Oh, well that's ok; I have a few in my family that are Mormon." I asked the other small talk questions to him, one being "What have you been up to since you retired." to which he responded "Staying alive." I liked this guy.

So the conversation was pretty general and I thought I should probably get going and I said to him, "Well, I should probably go back and get my car." But then he started to open up and went into how this was the first thing he's eaten in two days. He wasn't homeless or anything so I wondered why he had said it. He told me that he had to get some blood work done so he couldn't eat or drink anything. He spoke with such distaste toward the process so I thought I'd cheer him up by laughing with him about those "silly medical procedures these days." I learned he takes pills in the morning and in the evening, everyday.

I started to see how much this guy reminded me of grandpa. He really looked like Albert, actually. I learned that this man's name was Dan, 78 years old, worked for the City of Richmond and retired about 17 years ago and now works part time at the club house in his neighborhood. We found out that we both liked barbeque, North Carolina barbeque, which has more of a vinegar taste than Virginia bbq. The reason he knows that is that he grew up outside of Raleigh which is the "South" and apparently Virginia isn't the South, and even Richmond is much more of a "Northern city." I've heard this before from southerners, and I have a hard time believing it because at one time Richmond was the capitol of the Confederacy. Dan said that was true too, and he remarked that they might soon take down some of those "Southern" monuments on Monument Avenue before too long because of the problems with the emphasis on the racial aspects of the confederacy and the Civil War.

He asked me what I did, I told him Marketing. He said, "that's where the real money is." I said that I hoped so, because I work at an accounting firm where the CPA's make a ton more than we do. He laughed about the CPA firm stuff. He said he took an accounting class in college and hated it. (See, me and Dan have so much in common now). I told him an accounting joke which he laughed and smiled. I noticed he started smiling more. From the overhead speakers, I also heard the song "Land Down Under" which is the same song Tim and I sang at karaoke Thursday night. Weird, it was like I was meant to be here.

He elaborated on why he thought there was so much money in Marketing. His neighbor has a son who works in Austin, Texas for a big marketing/advertising company and they fly him around the world. He was just in Tokyo recently. Dan's convinced that's the best job there is, well, next to Baseball Players (who get paid too much.) Dan's brother is a CPA and we both talked about "How could anybody enjoy doing Income Taxes" but apparently Dan's brother does.

So it was really time for me to pick up my car so I told him I had to leave and that it was nice talking with him. He remarked that he thought I was a salesman trying to sell him something. He said people are always calling him telling him he won something or that his warranty for his car is over. He slams down the phone when he hears the pitch, or (and this is my favorite) he asks them for their name, social security number, and credit card number ('cause that's what they want from him, so he might as well try to get it from them.) They usually hang up when he does that. How clever!

I said "No, I'm just from a small town and we talk to people we don't know cause that's what people in small towns do." I put the pieces together now. Quite possibly when I was about to leave earlier to go pick up my car, he saw that I was just a regular guy and began to open up about why he hadn't eaten in two days. My guess is that when he figured out that I wasn't trying to convert him - being a Mormon, or trying to sell him something - salesman he felt like it was safe enough to just talk about life and experience.

I told him that I enjoyed the conversation and I thanked him for keeping me company while I was here by myself. And I think he felt that way too. You should have seen how much he was smiling by the end of it. It's like he and I were friends now, with just a few years to separate us. As far as I'm concerned we might as well be friends: we both like barbeque, think baseball players get paid to much, are confused by accounting, don't like Mormons trying to convert us and get annoyed with salespeople and deal with them in clever ways. That's just bout all you need to be friends.

I closed the conversation and stood up. We shook hands, introduced ourselves, and I picked up my things and headed out of McD's. As I was walked back to get my car, I thought to myself how glad I was that Dan and I didn't have to eat alone today.

Maybe I'll try this again.

Modern Nobility

I've been working on an idea of nobility for contemporary American society - attempting to adapt the ideals of nobility to a culture that believes everyone is equal. How does one behave in a way that is above the common inclination of humankind, without at the same time looking down upon humankind for acting on its inclinations?

I think I have at least a partial answer, in the form of a list of behaviors. It may not be complete; your thoughts and contributions would be appreciated.


Today’s Nobles Strive…

…To be Socially Aware;

…To Conduct themselves, their Doings, and their Conversations with Dignity by:

1. Immediately and Fully claiming Responsibility for their Failures, but
2. remaining Quiet about their Successes,
3. Challenging no-one Foolishly or Vacuously,
4. being Unafraid to receive Reproach, whether Merited or not,
5. Considering Carefully all Criticism leveled against them for any Scrap of Truth,
6. Proactively offering Leadership where it is wanting, and
7. Following Supportively and with Grace where it already exists.

…To Protect others, both verbally and socially, by:

1. Displaying a ready Wit,
2. never underestimating another’s Potential,
3. never taking Advantage of others or Abusing positions of authority,
4. being Unafraid to give Reproach where Reproach is merited,
5. making Promises Wisely and Keeping them Always.

I've Been Rejected!!!

I recieved my first rejection letter for Alchemy via e-mail yesterday, July 30, at 11:06 AM. Let me give you a brief, generalized overview of the publishing process, so you can understand why I'm so excited about being rejected =)

Your first step in getting published, after you've written the book, is to send off a "query" to agents or publishing houses that you think might be interested in your story. What exactly a query consists of varies from place to place - some will want sample chapters, some a synopsis, some an outline - you get the idea. All of them want a one-page cover letter, and if that one-page cover letter doesn't absolutely grab their attention, they won't bother to read the other stuff. In the cover letter, you are supposed to (1) explain & sell them on your idea (2) tell them who you are and what relevant experience you have, if any (3) tell them what other great books your book is like, (4) tell them why your book has a unique, competitive edge on similar works (5) explain your target audience/market, and (6) have you forgotten that you put all of this on one page?

Anyway, once you send off your query, you wait about 2-6 months to be rejected. (If you're very very fortunate, a more positive result will occur - obviously, for this I continue to hope.) You will recieve one of three kinds of rejections:

1 - The Silent Treatment. This probably means your letter sucked, and that they didn't bother reading the whole query. You didn't present yourself or your idea well enough for them to take you seriously.

2 - The Stock Rejection. "Dear Writer: We regret that we are unable to use your work at this time..." This means you did ok, they're taking you seriously enough to do you the professional courtesy of letting you know that you should be publisher-shopping elsewhere.

3 - The Personal Rejection. They liked you and your idea, they really did - but, for one reason or another, they simply can't buy your book right now. This means, keep trying!!


It was, as you may have guessed, a personal rejection that I have just recieved.

It reads:

"Well crafted query letter. One of the best in about, oh, a 1000 emails. Unfortunately we're not looking for a [Fantasy] book right now. We wish you the best of luck. You seem to know what you are doing, so you should be able to find a publisher, just keep at it."

WOO-HOO!!!

A Coming Ritual

One day in the near future, I will walk into a bookstore and pick up a book from the display rack. I will examine the author’s name with a smile, open the book, and trace my fingers across the pages—recognizing each line, recalling the many revisions the text received, reliving the thoughts and emotions I felt when I first put the words on paper. I’ll look inside the front cover and check the name of the publishing company, remembering the first several rejection letters I received before my book proposal was accepted. I may read the book’s last few pages right there, to remind myself of the way I will have finally decided to resolve the plot’s conflict. Maybe I’ll buy a copy, just to prove to myself that I’m not still dreaming about this day.

written as part of my college application personal statement, 11/29/01

Confessions of a Comic-Book Hero

I … exist.

I can begin with no other premise.

The riddle of existence – its nature, its substance – is a question for philosophers. Those who lose themselves in the philosophers’ game are fools; the contestants squabble over emptiness and disciple their onlookers with clever words meant to impress the unlearned.

Any reasonable person will confess his own existence as fact. Each person’s own experience confirms this. It is true that experience is subjective, however, this truth is irrelevant to the present consideration. Experience is inescapable; the subjectivity of its revelations cannot be helped. Existence is universally experienced by all living beings, even if each being experiences existence differently. As I said, the nature of existence is a subject for the philosophers’ game. I want answers that are more useful.

I exist … and I am not alone.

Any reasonable person will confess that he, she, … or it, if you insist … is not the only mindful being in existence. The mere fact that you are reading this essay, a creative organization of ideas not conceived in your own mind, proves this. Or it proves that all learning is an illusion, and that your mind merely uses what you perceive to be sensory input as a way of making your conscience self aware of things that you already knew. If that is the case, you cannot claim to be anything more than a vast and powerful mind indulging itself in a complex imaginative exercise in which a limited part of itself is made to perceive itself as a human being engaging in a “lifetime” of interaction with other human beings in a setting called “Earth.” In essence, you claim to be role-playing with yourself. You nerd.

If the “known universe” and all it contains really is just a figment of your greater mind’s imagination, then none of the people or places you “know” are real and there are no consequences that, so far as your limited self is aware, are able to reach beyond the end of this imaginative exercise, this game. Furthermore, you know nothing about the true nature of existence – the place your greater mind occupies outside the game – or why that greater mind thought playing this game was a good idea, or why you didn’t get a better life in it.

While possible, this scenario is essentially useless. It is no more likely to be true than the alternative, and if the alternative is true but I live as if is not, my existence will never achieve anything nobler than hedonism. Conversely, if I live as if the alternative is true, my existence can have a meaning that is valuable in either model.

Ah yes, the alternative.

I said that the nature and substance of existence are riddles for philosophers; however, the meaning of existence is a profitable subject for common discourse.

For you see, so far as we know, we can give meaning to our own existence.
Having sensibly admitted that I exist and that I share my existence with others, the next question is what to do about it?

Humanity tends to think of purpose as linked to a thing’s beginning. This is because we are a creative species. We make things with a purpose in mind. So when we ask that million-dollar question, “why are we here?” we often get sidetracked by another question: “where did we come from?”

Forget that question. It’s not likely that an answer will be found in my lifetime that is any more satisfying than the ones that have already been proposed. Evolution provides a useful explanation for biological development on the micro level, but it becomes conveniently difficult to prove or disprove on the macro level and once they go far enough back to be talking about origin theory, they may as well be talking about God, a First Cause, some kind of supernatural agent that brings everything into being. There is very little difference between a Big Bang and creation ex nihilo; the spontaneous development of life from non-life and consciousness from non-consciousness require similar leaps of faith. Where did we come from? We don’t know.

What I do know is that we’re here. And I think I can know what we are.

First, we are animals. We are driven by the same basic instincts for food, shelter, survival, sex; we have similar physical attributes and exhibit similar behaviors to animal species. But that is not enough.

We are also more than animals. We engage in complex patterns of communication that involve abstractions and the interchange of symbols; we have hyper-developed social constructs that are, at best, only vaguely related to animalian instincts; we imagine, make, and use complex tools and visual records; we adapt our environment to suit us, rather than adapt ourselves to suit our environment. I will not rush to place values on these faculties: perhaps we are the higher beings; perhaps we have underestimated animals insofar as their communication and behavior patterns are concerned; perhaps the animal world is, as some have suggested, far wiser than we, having previously explored and rejected (or known better than to explore) these marks of humanity; but our differences are undeniable. What I want to know is why these differences exist.

Humanity’s entire activity is, fundamentally, a quest for control. We seek to control our circumstances, our environments, our bodies, our posthumous existence, and other people. We seek control in these areas through all of the means available to us: money, social influence, political power, scientific advancement, and the majority of religious practices. Each of these offers its own form of control, as well as thinly-disguised routes to other types of control. We seek control out of deep-seated needs for respect and stability. We seek control both individually and communally.

I exist. I am not alone.

I am surrounded by control freaks.
I’m one of them myself.

Possibly the most basic aspect of existence in which we consistently attempt to exert control is that of experience and perception. Often, we cannot control what we experience, but we can and do control how we perceive it. We do this all the time. We determine the meaning of a word as it journeys from a friend’s lips to our minds; we decide whether to value an event or circumstance as being good or bad. We choose to rely on the opinions of other people to heavily influence our perceptions; since society functions due to shared meaning, this is communally important but not always individually healthy.

It is for this reason, that perception is controlled by the individual and influenced by the community, that experience is said to be subjective. Multiple people experiencing the same event perceive it differently according to their own will and set of influences. More correctly, it is not experience that is subjective but our perceptions of it.

If existence is experienced and experience is perceived, then existence is perceived. To perceive an experience is to give it meaning; so existence can be given meaning by those who perceive it.

Presumably, the test of whether or not I have correctly perceived an experience is the test of functionality. If a friend speaks a word that we mutually understand, our communication has been basically successful – I have assigned the proper meaning to that auditory experience. If it snows, closing roads and forcing me to stay home, I judge it to be “good” or “bad” because I correctly understand the results of that event. Reality exists beyond our perceptions; perceptions are subjective but experience and existence are not.

This, then, is my task … to assign a meaning to my own existence that functions in reality.

So it begins.



PART TWO

Man is primarily constituted as an act of his or her own mind.

Psychology debates whether a person is more a product of nature or nurture, but this question bypasses a factor which is far more fundamental: the reaction of will.

Development is not dictated by genetic predispositions or environmental influences; it occurs as a series of reactions to these factors. These reactions are choices, conscious, subconscious, and unconscious.

Some will call my assertion circular, because choices we make are advised by our genetic predispositions and environmental influences. This is true but incomplete. To argue that our choices are completely advised – that is to say, that they are no more than a selection between all the ideas available to us during the moment of decision – is to deny the possibility of original thought. And if representative individuals are incapable of original thought than so is humanity as a whole, which would mean that original thought does not exist for humanity. For that to make sense, you must also argue for the existence of another order of being whose minds are or were somehow capable of transmitting all of our ideas to us. This scenario is, once again, theoretically possible but completely useless.

If, then, we are capable of original thought, it seems most likely to occur during early, high-development stages of life, when the mind is less cluttered by – all this, – by life.

We make of ourselves what we will; rarely as we wish, but always as we will.

Why, then, when we want to know what our lives mean, do we look outside of ourselves?

The simple truth is that we don’t, not really.

Few people will confidently assert that they know the meaning of life in the cosmic sense; but most people act as though they know the meaning of their own. They spend the bulk of their time pursuing money, pursuing love, pursuing respect, pursuing whatever makes them happy. Most people effectively consider their lives a means to an end; that end, self-fulfillment. Life becomes currency; we “spend our lives” doing this or that in order to gain some other thing, some condition or situation that we have chosen to be our source of fulfillment. Upon attaining that condition, some people find that they chose well; many others, perhaps most, discover, perplexed, that they have not.

What choice do I have?

Use my life to buy something else? What? For whom? For me?

No.

I have needs and wants; I won’t ignore them; neither will I be dominated by them.

Every social, religious, philosophical, and moral system in human history has placed a premium on self-sacrifice. The only universal argument against selflessness is the claim that it’s illogical. But whether we rose from animals or not, we are far and away at the top of a very short list of known types of beings that has the luxury of devoting less than our entire energy towards physical survival, maintenance of health, growth, and reproduction. It could be said that we’re forced to devote much of our excess energy to mental survival, health, and reproduction, since for us the life of the body is secondary to the life of the mind; and yet, even so, there is plenty of remainder for altruism. There is also such a thing as being overripe.

I’m beginning to sound like I want to be some kind of hero. Perhaps a hero in moderation.

In defense of such a position, heroism is perhaps best when practiced by those without superpowers. There are only two possible moral choices for a person with extrahuman powers – total abstinence out of respect for the potential consequences, or compassionate activism. Those who chose to be active face the Lois Lane dilemma: every moment taken for oneself and one’s own interests is a moment that the hero ought to spend in the service of others. Only an ordinary man has the opportunity to practice heroism without the moral imperative for self-denial.

If life must be currency – and indeed, it comes solely on a use-it-or-lose-it basis – then I will devote whatever I can spare to the benefit of others.

I don’t know how much that will be. I’m not sure what exactly I’ll be doing. I’m no superhero; I’ll have no revelation of special powers to point me in any particular direction. I’m not even sure I know what’s good for other people. Maybe it’ll come, situation by situation.

I exist. I am not alone.

I am what I am. I see what I see. I am where I am, when I am.

I’ll do what I can.