A Long Way From Anything

A little hip-shot of my trail of thought:

Supposedly after my graduation this spring I'm going back to Europe for a little vacation. I can't wait to get back to Ireland (I miss decent beer, good weather, tasty scones, and beautiful Irish women). Because so many of my ramblings come from my travels, in a certain way I'm running out of stories to tell. All of my friends have heard my tales time and time again. This bothers me (the fact that all of them begin "So there I was, drunk in Ireland..." doesn't help at all). It reminds me of What Mr. Sartre said in his novel Nausea:

A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell. - p.56

In the context of this, so many things in my life could be attributed to this desire to tell a story. So many aspects of my personality could be reduced to psychoanalytic babble. For that reason alone I almost feel secure in rejecting Mr. Sartre's ideas. To follow his method would necessarily invalidate large chunks of my life. Using his theory though, my love of my heritage could be called into question. Compounding this is something Mr. Robert Heinlein once said: "people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them." I would certainly hope not. In a way though this is possible. I have always sought out things to give my life meaning. But is this a bad thing? Should we not seek to be and do something great with our lives?

But then again, as John Wayne once said: "It is my heritage to stand erect, proud, and unafraid." So maybe ensconing oneself in heritage is not a bad thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 07, 2004 at 1:54 PM.