I wouldn’t have so readily agreed to go through the trouble of engaging the services of a friend to manage the IT back end of a website, not to mention drill him around with the minute details of exactly how I wanted it to look, if not for ulterior motives.
Being swayed by people whom I have never met, saying “We need a write-up!”, is not something I would do. I was already thinking of ways of fend them off, but such measures would only be temporary - as soon as a new video was out, they would come knocking on my door with the same chant. That made me wonder, were they blind to the expended effort of gathering footage, scripting, narrating and putting together increasingly long and elaborate videos? Perhaps, and I had the option to ignore the voices, but the nature of my constant brooding over things would not have slienced them in my mind. I have come to regret appeasing outside forces to try to “silence” them. When I was twelve, it resulted in a good friend of mine having his beliefs confirmed that I had a thing for a girl he had a thing for - just because I said the stupid words “I like her because her father worked at Boeing”. It was only several years later that I realized that a firm ‘no’ - and perhaps, a series of appropriately timed and firm nos would have sufficed, saving me the long-lasting embarassment of an easy lie.
The ulterior motive in question was to get myself to write again. Although I had been tinkering with electronics as a hobby since I was thirteen, I never took it seriously. It was a ‘side thing’. And it was not until three years later, in my second-to-last year of high school, that I looked back and realized that I had come far and learned a great many things - and that might make a good career. Fittingly, it was also around this time that I had, of my own accord, decided to ‘settle down’ and try to lead a less, and I will only admit to saying, active life. And before that, ever since I was in class eight, I had wanted to drop out and become a writer.
Communicating in a complex construction of sounds governed by intricate rules, as arbitrary as they are, is what sets human beings apart from other creatures of flesh and blood. Although several other life forms have displayed communication through elaborate sounds, they are yet to form advanced civilizations and social structures. At some point in time, some bright spark (the same spark that perhaps lit the first fire?) had the idea to associate symbols with sounds, and record them in a way that would outlast the spark himself. And that was the beginning of immortality. Although this form of records depends on a physical medium, some media have the ability to persist well beyond a lifetime - or several - or several thousand. Written records are the only immortality humanity will ever achieve. It never fails to impress me how hieroglyphs have survived, and even been decoded, giving us an intimate look into a society and culture long buried under the (literal) sands of time. The persistence of wisdom, science and mathematics beyond the culture that created them has given us a broad and reliable shoulder to stand upon and look further than we ever could.
Although knowing how to read, write and speak a language, a skill that is unfortunately taken for granted these days, since it is indeed granted by law (in most countries) to everyone, it is quite easy to discern written material that stands on a broad a reliable shoulder from that which is simply a string of thoughts put together without much care about grammar or style. The latter can get you through your days, but to get you beyond them requires the former.
I was mostly oblivious to these thoughts as I was walking back home from the LUH cafeteria (Conti Campus anyone?) at Königsworther Platz in Hannover, Germany. Two things ahead of me quickened my pace. The first was my part-time job, what I called a ‘dream job’, which is a story in itself. The second was a brash coupon I’d found in my postbox the previous day. I would have preferred it to be nondescript and compact, but it was embarassingly large, and shaped like the DM logo. One the back was a printed offer - all I had to do was walk into one of two DM stores, pick up a very specific tetra-pack of DM’s own branded apple and mango juice (with real mango puree!), hand over the coupon in exchange for the drink and walk out, no money involved. I’d folded it in half and put it into my bag, intending to use it as soon as possible, and making plans about using another one, which would eventually be discarded by my neighbours, to get another drink at the second location. I decided against that - it was too petty and the other store too far out of my way for a cheap drink.
Contemplating if it was too embarassing to just walk into a store I’d never visited before, just to grab a drink for free and face a possibly annoyed cashier, I walked past the public lending bookshelf just in front of Engelbosteler Damm 2. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted change. there was a series of books with similar looking spines. It turned out to be an encyclopedia - a valiant attempt at collecting information, now made redundant in the days of cheap internet access, which was probably the reason this fine collection was spending its days in a worn, graffiti and sticker-covered public bookshelf. My eyes scanned the series from right to left - the spines were black up to around two-thirds of the way up, with the title printed in white text. The upper white section was separated by a coloured band, different in each book in the collection. I was about to take my eyes off the shelf when a distinctive purple cover caught my attention. When I read the title - Septimus Heap: Book Four - Queste, I exclaimed loudly. Luckily, being a country used to minding their own business (which made me feel oddly at ease in public here, unlike back home), no one cared to notice.
Angie Sage’s most popular work was one of the earliest book series I’d read. That was when I was about 9, and it was the very same series that had gotten one of my (then) closest friends reading as well. there was something about it that made it linger in the back of my head over the decade or so since I’d last touched it. After high school, I’d decided that I simply didn’t have the time to slip out of this world and lose myself in someone else’s, and had put off reading anything fantastical or involving multiple parts (which I considered a solid emotional investment). The last fantasy book I remember reading was in late 2014 or early 2015, called The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke. Finding the Heap book from my childhood more than a decade ago in a random German city (known for being not known for anything) that I just so happened to move to was quite a revelation, it felt to me like an act of fate, since I was looking forward to reading through exactly this series when I visited home. Of course I picked it up. And finding out that Cornelia Funke was German, and that The Thief Lord I’d read was a translation, was doubly awakening.
It took me 8 solid hours of reading (spread over two days) to finish the 596 pages. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that I was done with it so quickly, since I did, after all, devour books at a similar rate in my younger days. It was quite reassuring to know that I still had ‘it’ in me, after years of my mind being shred to tatters thanks to the internet and social media. I found myself completely lost in Sage’s world, to the point of forgetting the reality I was currently in. That luxury I’d had while still living in my parents’ house, with everything being provided for, but one I could not afford to have while living and financing a precarious life alone as a student in a foreign country.
Just the act of reading the book was a great source of introspection and created a sense of wanting to go back to the days I could spend reading endlessly. Reading had been my source of creativity and inspiration, something which the world, a decade older, seems to sorely lack, and is happy having others (or computers!) provide it to them. It would be a very miserable generation we are raising, whose brains are so rotted by the constant overload of (mostly negative) information, having no imagination (can they imagine the places and people and things in these fantasy novels and see them in their mind’s eye?) of their own. As paper yellows and eventually crubmles, as all things do, will there be no new paper, warm and fresh from the printer, upon which the thoughts and feelings of the new millenium are condensed in dense, neatly typeset text? Will there be anything left when the bits and bytes have rotted away? Perhaps the few leaves of ancient texts that will outlast this internet post and its author will know.