Journal LordAlexander's Journal: Another year? Another life. 1
Well, I've done it. I've survived to 30 years of age.
Such an incomprehensible amount of time. I can remember looking around me in elementary school, and seeing the adults walk by. To me they were members of another species of man, if they truly were man, at all. And, now, I can't deny any longer that I am one of them. The self that was me at age 9 is truly gone. Or, is he dead? It's very hard to see even his shadow, from this perspective. Maybe he never existed at all, and I was always this adult being.
Memory plays such tricks on me, as I get older. I am truly unsure of the truth in the memories I have of the past. As time flows away, truth and falsehood seem to blend into a kind of mud of shared history, opinion, and self-deceit. I now understand what is meant, when it is stated that history is written by the victors. It is not, for the most part, a deliberate creating of a history to paint past actions in a certain light...it is the product of the flawed rememberances of those who survived the experience.
All this does make me wonder exactly who James Alexander Jacocks truly is. I have always thought that a person is the sum total of all his thoughts and actions, throughout his life. But, if history is so malleable, so unsure, what sort of valid information is gained by totaling it up?
The only thing that is concrete is myself, here and now. Yesterday was a fairy tale, tomorrow a dream. Maybe I was re-created in my own image, when I dreamed, last night. Or maybe, last night was the true reality, and this is only a faint echo of my true self.
I suppose that there is no absolute truth to be had. There is no one to look down at me from far above, and give the completely unassailable truths that only a parent can give to a child.
The shadow of the child that I might once have been still longs for them.
Gaining years (Score:2)