Letter from an Ex-Tragedian

by practicalspactical

I use to be a young Tragedian. 

What was it that stirred my young mind, what heightened excitement, what strange mix of destiny & accident & high swirling emotions, that lurched me towards Hamlet and away from grinning Puck? 

I know not. Perhaps it was the Jabberwock. Or the monster in the closet. Or the pillars of light in a dark forest on a television show when I was eight years old. 

Perhaps it was the stories I was told, of Exodus, and Genesis, and banishment from a Garden; perhaps it was the stand of narrow trees in my great-grandfather’s backyard in which I dashed and darted, calling it, with a gleeful precociousness that echoes back to Adam, with the capitalized Name the Jungle — 

Richly imaginative, I always was, and loved stories, stories most of all, great sweeps of good against evil — 

I was born in 1982, and as Capitalism Triumphant decided to turn its blinded eye and deafened ears and invisible hand on my young bumptionness (manchild of post-America) it decided blindly — through natural selection — in what form it would convince me & my parents to pursue the accumulation of goods — 

And they did it through figures, but figures animated by stories, wonderful technicolor drawn stories, great sweeping epics, echoing Star Wars & Lord of the Rings & full of Great Heroes and Evil Warlords & Evil Empires — 

Thus, forty years after the death of my people in the ovens of Europe, I got it told to me a different way, in the flashing of lights on the video box — 

Good versus Evil. 

Now I go to buy the conclusion of a series I have read for eighteen years, since I was twelve. The Wheel of Time. 

There are no beginnings or endings on the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. It was an ending.