I am reading
my way through Salman Rushdie’s new book, Two
Years, Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights (a thousand and one nights.) I don’t know if I will finish the book; his
books usually tell Eastern metaphysical stories that I find difficult to follow
– and sometimes my interest in the outcome fades; but his thoughts, his
sentence structure, his jewels of complex reason keep me coming back.
A sentence
in this his new book crept into my mind like a song or melody you just can’t get
rid of.
“We are all
stories within stories.”
A parallel universe of stories.
There is a
story of me; a story of my family, a story of my birth family, a story of my
family tree, a story of my race, nation, my place in the world, the cosmos, and
all possible branches from each of those possibilities – and in each story I
take a lesser and lesser roll until I am minuscule.
We are each
a story within a story; but the only story that matters to our egocentric id is
the personal story of ourselves – because beyond that we matter less and less,
until we find ourselves totally unimportant.
the Ol'Buzzard
