excitement is an escape

What attracts me to the classic authors is not the whole I'm a literati effect, but the topics they chose to highlight in their material. I've observed that classic writers like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, even James Joyce, have the keen gift of romanticizing the mundane. Their protagonists are often ordinary people with ordinary traits. No superhero, genius, incredibly good-looking, super wealthy people, but mostly townsfolk living in ordinary conditions.

Little did these classic authors know that their artistic urges have become some sort of time machine. A depiction of how men lived during their time. Of course, we have H.G. Wells, Kafka, Dante, Poe and all those other writers of out-of-this world classic stories...who clearly prefer to delve into the imaginary, perhaps as a form of escapism. Maybe even an escape from some dullness or real-life tragedy.

Going back to the beauty of the ordinary, I realized that people these days clamor for excitement. The adrenaline rush of juicy gossip or must-see movies with cool trailers or some controversial novel. I also observed the attractiveness of the impossibly tragic, angst-filled soap operas with the protagonists always experiencing heart-wrenching injustices.

There's a scarcity of the ordinary person. What goes on inside one's head in between conversations or while one is doing non-verbal activities. Most of the time, we are all thinking. Thinking of our to-do list, what to eat for our next meal, degrading our enemies in our heads, lusting about something or someone, daydreaming...
WE ARE THINKING ANIMALS.

And the thinking process, whether involving rocket science or emotion-filled musings, requires a lot of energy. It's tiring. Like reading. Breathing is irregular, blood sugar becomes low and the next thing we know, we have an inexplicable headache that can only be solved by a coffee break. My brother's girlfriend recommended caffeine to dilate capillaries in the head. It does seem to work...whether due to actual capillary dilation (increased blood supply in the head) or the break in coffee break.

As an ending to this post, I'd like to quote a portion of John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday:

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away---you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch---and your mind says, "Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?" All of these, of course, are the foundation of man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. "What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?" And now we're coming to the wicked, poisoned dart: "What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?" And this isn't vanity or ambition. Men seem to born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.