Where to begin? When writing a theological text about the beginning of everything while trying to persuade your readers/listeners that the god you advocate is the one who set it all in motion, this is not a very hard thing to do. You simply start with the beginning of creation by your omnipresent and all-powerful god. But what when you're starting somewhere in the middle? You can't just start telling the things that happen to you, you have to create a beginning. In such a case one has to open with a bang, with a very beautiful description or a famous appropriate quote. However, it seems all the good ones have been taken.
It would be so easy if my life was a fairytale, because then I would be able to start with the sadly underestimated but in reality marvelously devised traditional opening sentence 'Once upon a time..' (or, as I am in Italy, 'C'era una volta...'). But my life is not a fairytale, fortunately, because then I would probably be a cliche and no one would bother reading what I have to say. So it's a good thing that my life is not a fairytale, but unfortunately this happy fact does not diminish my stress about finding an appropriate beginning.
I could start at my own beginning, 'To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe)...' But to make matters worse, this has also been done before by no one less than the impressive and witty but sadly sometimes also dull, tedious and sleep-invoking Charles Dickens in his David Copperfield. As I have no wish to be accused of plagiarism nor have any intention of comparing myself with a widely recognized and admired literary genius, it would not be wise to publish here my own disgustingly imperfect version of one of his products of superb inspiration.
No, I am afraid I do not possess the skill and knowledge to think up a beautiful, singular, perfect, one-of-a-kind, wildly inspirational and inimitable beginning of my own. There is, however, one author who has written the perfect beginning appropriate for a story starting in medias res and that is Robert Jordan. Please ignore the references to the fictional history and geography of the story he is about to tell, but think about the notion that time is immeasurable and repetitive and that there are many beginnings. That is what tickled my fancy.
'The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Rhannon Hills. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.'
No comments:
Post a Comment