Both very fitting, and very thoughtful. I can see why they came to mind.
Yeah, it feels now like, without even knowing it, I lived through this whole season of my life where I was enchanted by this busy, high-minded struggle going on all around me in the Bay Area: The struggle to get "into the room where it happens". To push one's efforts or name into the center of things that are seen externally - and perhaps only retroactively - as important. As innovative, disruptive, world-changing, et cetera. So much of that history is written in hindsight, after all the scaffolding and failure has been swept away.
Now it makes me think of a few paragraphs from an Anne Rice novel I read some time in the 90's, about the vampire Lestat. Cursed with near-immortality in the body of a relatively young man, and looking for something to do, he got involved in an acting troupe with another vampire friend of his, and they both got infatuated with a lady also in the troupe. Every night the three of them would go on stage and perform these partially-improvised dramas where Lestat and his friend would compete to woo the lady, with duels or debates or feats of heroism ginned up with props, and at the end of each show the lady would fall for one or the other of them. They all threw their souls into it, and the show became a consistent hit. And so, Lestat just fell into a routine, doing variations of this overheated love triangle act night after night for the same lady against the same suitor, on the same big stage, blowing through something like ten years. And then one day right in the middle of a performance he just suddenly stopped giving a shit and walked off, with empty pockets and no idea what to do next.
I think that season ended for me when I was at my previous job. Maybe about three years in.
no subject
Yeah, it feels now like, without even knowing it, I lived through this whole season of my life where I was enchanted by this busy, high-minded struggle going on all around me in the Bay Area: The struggle to get "into the room where it happens". To push one's efforts or name into the center of things that are seen externally - and perhaps only retroactively - as important. As innovative, disruptive, world-changing, et cetera. So much of that history is written in hindsight, after all the scaffolding and failure has been swept away.
Now it makes me think of a few paragraphs from an Anne Rice novel I read some time in the 90's, about the vampire Lestat. Cursed with near-immortality in the body of a relatively young man, and looking for something to do, he got involved in an acting troupe with another vampire friend of his, and they both got infatuated with a lady also in the troupe. Every night the three of them would go on stage and perform these partially-improvised dramas where Lestat and his friend would compete to woo the lady, with duels or debates or feats of heroism ginned up with props, and at the end of each show the lady would fall for one or the other of them. They all threw their souls into it, and the show became a consistent hit. And so, Lestat just fell into a routine, doing variations of this overheated love triangle act night after night for the same lady against the same suitor, on the same big stage, blowing through something like ten years. And then one day right in the middle of a performance he just suddenly stopped giving a shit and walked off, with empty pockets and no idea what to do next.
I think that season ended for me when I was at my previous job. Maybe about three years in.