I think I have become a lover of posts that pass their 24 hour mark. A Dead Thread kinda guy. (And no, don't forgive that pun - I wouldn't.) This chat puts a genuine smile on my face. So to all, thanks for that.

For 30 years, I've lived on the road. Never gotten to live within 1,000 miles of my true "home." This kind of life forces me, every year, to choose which books to keep and carry. My poet? Eliot. My philosopher? Nietzsche. So... as you might guess, this thread makes me smile. Just for that.

The egg & the wall. The inner self and the public. Fear and fruitful lies. Naturally, I'd like to claim that I am the Eggman, and let it be. (Ouch.)

Ok. Lemme try this. What if there are two external worlds, and two eggs in each of us. Sounds silly perhaps, but in times of real historical trauma, that's not unheard of. What if there is one world crumbling, and one rising? The egg representing the crumbling world is one which is largely false, dying, rotting. Untrue to itself somehow, or bad for us. And another egg with potential to hatch, grow, and build, reproduce, flesh out a newer world. Two dreams, one being born, one dying. Both within us.

How live then?

Within myself, I decided at some point to ... work for the New Egg. And a New World for it. I have the best credentials one could have, to operate the Wall, the Old World. Ones that get me into rooms to speak with some Very Rotten Eggs. PM's and Princes, CEO's and Editors.

On the other hand, I am a Good Egg. I work to build a New World, New Dream. (Even though I know it will have its Wall'ish tendencies. It's own rot.)

Now. Do I cloak? Disguise? Live a lie? Mask?

Or tell the truth? Tell the personal detail? Speak my dreams?

What I have chosen to do is... to create. Both/And. Truth and Lies. Fiction, Non-Fiction. Cloak and Reveal. Reveal a Cloak.

And - painful oddity here - I found I needed to do this with both groups. The officially Rotten ones, and the ones somewhat Busier being Born. Why? Well, many of those hurling rocks at the Wall turn out to be, IMO, bullshit artists.

Eggs aren't meant to be smashed against Walls. That part's easy. But neither are they meant to hatch and then simply turn to throwing rocks at the old Wall. Or to sit there contemplating their genius and better nature. I believe we're at the end of an age, a 400+ year long age. And that we need to give birth to what's in our damned eggs, and swiftly, or we may not get that many more turns. Kill enough eggs, and you get no new chickens. But then.... to grow those little chickies up into the next generation. And build a New World for them. Sometimes, even reusing the stones once part of the old Wall.

So to some degree, I spend time tossing Eggs through gaps in the Wall. To some degree, building the New World. Some, on raising the Eggs up. Some, fighting to make sure they aren't crushed. And some, sorting this all out, and laughing at my own confusion.

I think we all do this, some mix of this, and especially in THIS time.

Which is where JLH's personal and public worlds, interest me. The only way I've found, to live with this situation, of double yolked eggs and double walls and worlds, is to wear masks, and reveal, Russian Dolls perhaps. Refuse labels, never quite fit. Which has been interesting, albeit exhausting. If I am invited to meet a Prime Minister, I wear jeans and T-shirts. If I hang with my friends, my official credentials and work in the Old World always keep me sliiiiightly apart.

There have been many surprises on this path. The seeming rottenest of Eggs, Directors of the Wall, will sometimes reveal... their own tender Other Egg. And want, and even be willing to act, to further that end. I don't want to tip the balance too far here. I find everyone a mix, yes. But there are levels and degrees.

And also, a cost, whichever way I turn. A member of perhaps an entire Generation which is... between.

Which brings me to..... not the writing of fiction, and the fruitful/creative lie there. But the living of one.

Not just the reading or the writing of a story. But living one. Creating one. A story, or a history. Depending on how you want to look at it.

And how confusing & garbled was that, Dear Quinn? Dreadfully so, Dear Bad-Egged Self. But don't worry, it'll be your turn next, oh my Double-Yolker. ;-)

As Nietzsche profession was Philology I am ever happy to engage a sidebar discussion of the meaning of a word. I chose the citation from Aeschylus because it is the earliest appearance of “hamartia” in Greek literature. It is of course written as a line of dialogue and its meaning at that time was the very ordinary notion of an archer “missing” his target. A century later Aristotle found it useful in his discussion of the nature of Tragedy. By that time it indeed did mean “mistake” or “error” in the general sense and that is how we understand Aristotle’s usage as he explains his notion of the structure of tragedic literature. I am pleased that our exchange has reached this depth of thought but the medium does not allow either of us the opportunity to do it justice. My point, admittedly too briefly stated, was that, before our modern science of Psychology, the notion of “insanity” had nothing to do with pathology and everything to do with the maintenance of “good order.” I tried desperately to find an on-line link to a most useful article by David A. Boruchoff titled “On the place of madness, deviance, and eccentricity in Don Quijote.” It is available but only to various subscriptions.” All I can do is tease you with a fractured extract:

“To understand the concept of madness present in Don Quijote de la Mancha, one must examine the discourse, topography and institutions with which it found expression in traditional culture, since it was the impression of ill-being or "in-sanity," rather than a finding of dementia or psychosis in clinical terms, that defined the madman for Cervantes and his contemporaries. Consigned to the frontier between the walls of the medieval city and the perils of the world beyond, the madman could neither flee the society that refused him, nor participate as an equal in its activities. His precarious circumstance at the margin is inherent in the duality of his image, making his condition as a pariah one with the scorn to which he is therefore subject. In this way, the study of madness illuminates the status of all those who could not or did not conform to the expectations of an ethos grounded in a collective concept of human relations…
With a similar belief in conformity, the ancient Greeks called the incursion of sin hamartia, taking this term from the science of archery, where it means to miss the mark. Tragedy's heroes are said, therefore, to suffer hamartia, rather than peripeteia alone-a sudden or calamitous change of fortune-, when their errors displace them from the path of happiness to that of disgrace and ill repute. Were it not for this process of dislocation, which Aristotle calls the "Discovery of transgression," tragedy could not instill fear and pity in the spectator, and thus oblige him to weigh the consequence of his own thoughts and actions…
Fortified by the ideal of unity, a similar system of value is present in the equation of difference with heterodoxy and schism in Christian theology, and in the institutions with which medieval society sought to combat dissidence and individualism in general…”

I find much similarity in Imperial Spain and modern America, and nothing is more similar than the lust for orthodoxy. I am old enough to have personally know “Beatniks” in San Francisco in the 50’s. These were the first people I ever met who were insane in this classical sense, Ginsberg’s “best minds of my generation.”

And now to your larger point which you expressed very well.

I think you are circling the problem. Perhaps I can lead you to the center. The social contract as a pragmatism is in no way innimical to the individual. But when this pragmatism asserts itself as an orthodoxy then the individual, the authentic self, is threatened. The story of Western Civilization is all about organizing life around orthodoxies. From the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment, the whole conversation was about what constituted the finest set of iron rules. Then a little over a century ago, it was discovered that humans have a way of being aware that is not located in “the mind.” Rather it is found somewhere else which we loosely term our “psychology.” Actually it had to be discovered because the intellectual constructions that explained this “mind” collapsed, but I don’t want to get all Kant and Hume on you here.
There are only a few seminal writers for this psychology. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are two of them. Surrounding them are a host of authors from various disciplines who have engaged in heavily metaphorical descriptions of this new notion of self and its conditions. This egg that we are speaking of here is as good a metaphor as any. An egg is all about potential, about becoming, about change. We hope the egg will mature into a well formed realization of its destiny but nothing is certain for the individual egg. For practical purposes of categorization we can say that a chicken egg tends toward becoming a chicken, a cat egg tends toward cat-ness and a human egg toward human-ness. However in our modern world we also understand that each egg has a unique awareness of itself being a chicken or a cat or a human.

Quixote was not satisfied with merely acting like a knight errand. He wanted to “be” a knight and for that he had to do knightly things. Everyone laughed at his behavior because for them it was sufficient to act like a knight to be one. They had no concept of the inner struggle to become something. They were in fact completely cynical about the sharade, what Kundera calls “the grand parade,” that was the public life. One must keep an eye to fashion and follow it carefully. To try to be an authentic source of the values of honor and decency threatened the central authorities who were not the forgiving sort.

The novel ends with Quixote on his deathbed thinking that he failed in his attempt to become a knight. The irony is that he had become a knight and had done so by his actions. In this way Cervantes presents, perhaps for the first time in literature, the suggestion that humans are all about becoming, and that being is the result of actions, not nature.

Most of our modern institutions are anacronysms. They are based on an understanding of the human condition that can no longer be sustained. We are only at the beginning of the process of leaving behind the midieval constructions of society and commerce. This public world that we create is merely the nest. It is not the egg. The egg knows itself and that is enough for it to have potential and to therefore be the most valuable thing. And Marukami would have us look inward to find this truth, not outward to some new abstraction of the mind.

And thanks again for an inspiring discussion.