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fractal007
Senior Member
since 2000-06-01
Posts 1958


0 posted 2009-02-15 07:45 PM



Some months ago I revisited the library at Minsone, hoping to read again the youth's volume of warring states lore.  After some browsing through Camgennia’s treasury of warring states texts, I came once again upon the Fragments of Camgennia.  Opening the text past the summary page, which I have in the past recounted, I came upon the young man's explication of Camgennia itself.


I began reading:


Built along the banks of the calm stream Albian north of our present metropolis, Camgennia was a society in which work was prized only insofar as it was needed in order to sustain life.  The ideal citizen was the scholar or the creator.  Indeed, such citizens were, as they are here, revered for their creative impetus.  But in Camgennia there was no imposed restraint upon them.  They were not expected to act as cynics in public life while relishing in their ideas in private, as so many must here.


I thought of the youth's culture.  Warring states Weiland.  It was a place of rich and deceptive culture, where indeed the upper classes were revered but also expected to put on a show of depression and cynicism.  I thought of the Canadian television drama, “North of Sixty,” in which the characters always seemed so dour and depressed.  Life for them was nothing but a constant bore and trauma.  Weiland was like this too, but the drama and the bitterness were, for those citizens who were most powerful, staged drama.  For the poor it was a constant reality.


Cynicism and bitterness were the standard veneer of the cultured in Weilandian society during the Warring States period.  They were what made society into an ecosystem in which only the strongest could flourish and in the face of which most fell into mediocrity, terrified of what might happen next, of what the world would do to them next.


Camgennia turned around our most treasured ideals.  She was a violation of all that is sacred.  Read, but don’t expect anyone to frown on you.  Think but don’t expect anyone to yell at you.  Write, but don’t expect anyone to spurn you.


And so, the Camgennians wrote.  They composed volumes of their lore, tales of their truths.



The youth, it seemed, had conditioned himself to see bitterness and criticism from others as a sign that he was living up to his ideals.  He saw criticism from others of his activities and pursuits as a sign that he was being creative and thus rising above society.  Yet it was precisely society’s bitterness in the face of the youth’s free spirit which allowed that spirit to soar.  I don’t think our narrator would have survived for very long in Camgennia.


In Camgennia no one criticized you for not being practical.  No one bitterly condemned your latest creation, or stomped on it with pontifications about the real world.  Everyone was free to live in luxury.  It was a society in which strength came automatically rather than being something for which one had to work, as it is in our own society.  Strength was a characteristic possessed by every member of the society – strength to build, strength to create, strength to imagine, strength to enjoy.  These were there a priori – modern conveniences unique to Camgennia.


And yet in our metropolis, wherein the sewage is handled for us, the waterways kept clean, the streets swept, the lights always on, and the buildings always turning to see all sides, one must fight for one’s own strength and for one’s own rights.  One must claim for himself the inner kingdom rather than relying on the external state to provide it for him, as the Camgennian did.



And herein lay the crux of the youthful narrator’s problems.  He wanted too much of his own society.  He wanted a free society to coddle him, to appreciate him and externalize his own ideals.

Leafing through more pages in the ancient volume, I came across a sample of Camgennian writing.  The text was in an indecipherable script, but the hand betrayed a youth tormented by a lack of appreciation.  It was a script onto which I had poured endless hours.  On many an occasion I resolved to solve the conundrum only to end the fruitless day in defeat and resignation – one man duped by a relic from another man trapped inside of a cynical and bitter society.  The script was indecipherable but its message was clear.  “This is the way out.  Join me in this safe and secure solitude, one porcupine tempting another with closeness.”


The unreadable gibberish went on for hundreds of pages.  I knew that probably dozens of the youth’s peers had looked at his creation and scoffed.  “What an impractical man!”  “You want to write?  Well don’t expect us to support you!”  “You think life is about creativity?  Well guess what!  In the real world life’s a torment and then you die!”


The Camgennian script was unlike anything we know of here in the metropolis.  Even now as I pen this treatise I cannot fathom even the slightest dot on the pages that precede this one.  Yet my intimate knowledge of the locals, my privileged access to their inner sanctums and to the underground streams which issued forth into their now desolate landscape offer me enough.

When the conquerors came they understood nothing of their victims.  Each blow they struck was a slash at the heart of an enigma which refused even to cry out in pain.



But what if the youth’s text had never even been discovered?  What if this was the masterpiece of a truly cultured Weilandian?  As I continued to turn the creaking pages of the work, I thought of what the youth might have been like.  Perhaps he was a wealthy businessman.  Perhaps he was a scholar.  Maybe he was even a beggar.  No, that didn’t make sense.  Where would he have gotten the paper on which to write, much less the ink or even the education?


Could this youth have been one who resisted successfully the death by a thousand scratches which so many a youth’s sense of morality must endure?  Perhaps the young man’s spirit ceased dying and instead bled all the more profusely a poisonous  puss of cynicism and bitterness for the consumption of the outside world all the while keeping for itself the life-nurturing blood of hope, love, virtue, and morality.


I closed the volume, feeling deep inside of me no shortage of confusion.  If the childish writer was strong, then the poor man of Weilandian society who could do the same thing as he – who could visit Camgennia – was infinitely stronger.

Life's short.  Think hard!
Me!

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