Stories

More recently, while writing A Visit to Japan, I wondered some more about stories.

On the one hand, I still want to distinguish my idea-self from my historical and biographical self (or audit trail), and I'm still far more interested in capturing the former. That's not quite true, actually. I'm interested in capturing the latter, too, and I do, by keeping a journal, but I don't expect it would make interesting and worthwhile reading for others.

Speaking of historical and biographical information, it amuses me that my placing stories on the same level as domains and glue is backed up by my classification of knowledge.

On the other hand, I do sometimes seem to find stories that I want to write down and make public, and when I do, I'd like for them to be persistent, and I'd sometimes like to be able to refer to them from within urticator.net. Making them part of urticator.net is by far the easiest approach.

In the end, it seems to me that maybe there is some point to the stories, even if I can't pin down what it is. If nothing else, I figure they can serve as an extended character note, as at the beginning of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

Two ELIZABETHANS passing the time in a place without any visible character.

They are well dressed—hats, cloaks, sticks and all.

Each of them has a large leather money bag.

GUILDENSTERN's bag is nearly empty.

ROSENCRANTZ's bag is nearly full.

The reason being: they are betting on the toss of a coin, in the following manner: GUILDENSTERN (hereafter “GUIL”) takes a coin out of his bag, spins it, letting it fall. ROSENCRANTZ (hereafter “ROS”) studies it, announces it as “heads” (as it happens) and puts it into his own bag. Then they repeat the process. They have apparently been doing this for some time.

The run of “heads” is impossible, yet ROS betrays no surprise at all—he feels none. However, he is nice enough to feel a little embarrassed at taking so much money off his friend. Let that be his character note.

GUIL is well alive to the oddity of it. He is not worried about the money, but he is worried by the implications; aware but not going to panic about it—his character note.