It’s five in the afternoon, incredible lighting makes the rocky mountain in front of me, across the stream, more majestic, more real. It is not easy to pick the right words to describe it, and artificial will it sound, but however weak and dimly pronounced, they are here the words, marking a memory newer than all that came before it.
It’s the younger narrative that remains and will guide future minds, simply by virtue of coming later, and fading later. It is the narrative of the grandsons rebelling, no matter what the cause, no matter how honorable or grotesque, no matter how eloquent. The stories told by the ones who come later will overlay everything ever told. Stories, myths, fables passed on through from generation to generation is always the result of selective adaptation. Instead of the metaphor “passing” on we could use the image of a series of distortion mirrors reflecting and re-writing stories at the same time.
What we have here is a platitude. Not untrue, but we are craving for something juicier.
We want to be the younger narrative and rejuvenate. I want to draw a circle of youth and vitality around these mountains, on this afternoon. I am as close as anyone can get to the view of these mountains – at this moment. I derive absolute authority from this authenticity. Because even our perception of beauty might be – we have to give the thought a try – the result of an interplay of dark powers beyond the grasp of our conscious selves.
And so we sit on our narratives. This mountain, these thoughts and above all a set of moral believes.
Some day we must accept the loss of our narrative to whoever comes after us.
Can we fully embrace the younger narrative of our sons and daughters, knowing that they will become the authority, that their stories will be told longer than ours. Soon, we will be the aging narrative. We will feel the loss of natural authority and will play defensive. Our values will become rigid and engraved in the protective surface of our minds, we will defend them because they are the strongest of our aged younger narratives, our afternoon sun mountain views.
We are not our narrative. That is an important insight.