A strange feeling of distance from reality, an intertwined perception of the trillions of realities that we hold true in their existence has washed across me in a night of philosophy and history, a classic blend of entertainment for weary souls still damned to walk this once paradise.
After indulging in some high-brow but youthful banter at Les Etages with my colleagues; discussing human nature, positive attraction, and the practice of wearing a one-piece on Bondi beach, Australia, I returned to my pleasant little garret slipping away on my new blades to therein find an e-mail from my Father in my sparse hotmail inbox.
In the mail he had attached his discoveries from a family geneology trip that he and my mother had taken to the far northern reaches of Scotland, even in his humble pensmanship a bleak and depressing sounding place. There they had travelled the Lochs and Glens in search of the remaining traces of our family's past, the cottages still standing and the records and censuses that with such basic information prove to so unveil the histories of our ancestry and create a vision of where we come from.
In the bar, legs shaking from my short trip, we discussed the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next and F's idea that ambition is an unneccessary hindrance to true human expression. It seemed to me to be an enthusiastic but early theory that lead me to think once again, but while watching these young philosophers debating earnestly on the rain spattered sidewalk I could not help but think back to my Kerouac essay that revealed to me so much of the suffering of the post-war generations. L seemed to have had experience of the changing perspectives of parents and children, the tensions that family life seems almost destined to carry in a world that perhaps systematically denies us the nourishing childhood that we so need, the familial rifts that separate us from our elders, the folly of youth versus the weary cautiousness of old age and the desire to see our children grow strong and proud but coupled with an oft crippling fear to dominate and unwittingly stiffle the development, or by alienating the youth from a prescribed path, drive them to greater advancement through a difficult struggle for independence.
The realisation that our family has risen from the humblest of origins, highland shepherds and local constables, to become professors at the country's most respected universities, computer engineers and international citizens of the world's great capitals was for me an awesome moment of revelation. The short expanse of 200 years has taken the blood of this mountain dwelling clan across the globe, and perhaps it was indeed that dreary existence on the fells of the extreme north that provoked our inherent wanderlust.
Whatever the pessimism of modern adolescents and weary travellers trying to pen memoirs and struggling to make teacher's salaries meet on an international budget I cannot be turned from the pursuit of something as yet unattained, a drive within me that is yet to realise it's full potential. As the Ted talk declared there are perhaps invisible forces that surround us, inhabiting the nooks and crevices of this Earth providing us with inspiration for our creativity, daemons to the Greeks, Genii to the Romans... How will mine be manifested?
"Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with them?"
