Every life is,
more or less, a ruin
among whose debris we have to discover
what the person ought
to have been.

-José Ortega y Gasset

The typical greeting for encounter of any sort is “How is your day?” The expected reply is a chipper “Just great!”  To answer simply “good” is sometimes received with disappointment.  We all know, even if we are unprepared to offer reasoned argument, — reality as experienced is conditioned by attitude.  A positive attitude, positive thinking makes a difference, and is a gift of common decency which we owe one another…

You are likely to agree.  That’s the expectation anyway, of which everyone is well aware.  In the back of my mind though, in one of those rooms where the curtains are almost never drawn, another equally true fact is present.  If you are satisfied with the social self that I am adept at presenting, you will never know me well.  Nor I you.

There is more, a lot more is involved with stories of my personal history, some of which I’ve not retrieved from the attic of my unconscious memory.  I rarely read solely for entertainment.  I read usually as an exercise of exploration, picking through a ruin.   If one pays attention it is possible to infer from the outlines, or from the details of an artifact which one finds, a story that is credible.  The imagination comes into play and one pictures what might have been reasonable circumstances for a time when…

Ruins are all around.  As a teenager I remember visiting Fort Macon State Park, remains of the old Confederate Fort that once defended the approaches to the port of Morehead City, North Carolina in The War Between the States.  I could imagine the dismay of the defenders when they recognized they had no way to respond to the Federal artillery fire from the landward side of the fort.  What was it like to endure a shrapnel wound, to die slowly, after being struck by cast iron fragment in the open courtyard of the fort?

The imagination is a valuable ally to reconstruct likely details of the past.

Every life ….. is a ruin.  I must discover what I ought to have been.

There’s still time!