Can a Lonesome Pine end up being a normal man?
Today I want to consider a Lonesome Pine who is perfectly normal in all other respects, and ask the question `Can such a fellow be normal?'
I think it's perfectly possible for a person who is completely socialized and well-adjusted' to want to write stories, and to start telling stories without an audience. Indeed, I think most writers begin this way (not that most writers can be considered to bewell-adjusted').
The question then arises, whether this person, having written some stories that he likes, would not seek out an audience. Wouldn't he (being normal after all) want to gain some approval from an audience? Wouldn't he want to share his good story with an audience?
It's possible that such a person would not have access to an audience – at least for a short period of time. Or he might find that all the people around him don't share his taste in stories, and so he doesn't think that they'd be interested in the stories that he tells. This person might still be perfectly `normal' in all our usual sense of the word, only finds himself thrust into a different culture or society.
Let us take for example a man whose business causes him to travel to a distant country. There he conducts his trade and grows fluent in the native tongue. All the same he feels nostalgic for his own country and his own tongue. He begins to set down (solely for his own amusement and pleasure) a series of stories about his childhood and hometown and the people he knew there. He quite understandably expects that the people amongst whom he is presently living would not share his interest or appreciation in news stories of people they've never known, a culture they've never experienced, and a language that they don't speak. It might even fall out that this exile or emigrant must spend the rest of his life in this foreign country and never return home again, and so he continues to tell his stories, writing them down carefully and lovingly and showing them to no one.
How many of such men would be able to continue this practice? How many would never copy their stories over and send them back home to the people he knows there, to share them?
Now let us say that there exists a perfectly normal human being who invents fictions for his own amusement, and writes them down as stories for himself. He enjoys these stories and he enjoys telling them. To himself, however, he admits and recognizes that the stories aren't a very good and are not publishable in any respect. He keeps these stories to himself for that reason.
In the old times, such a man would undoubtedly be called a dreamer and a fantasist and a wool-gatherer. Could such a man qualify as normal? Perhaps not entirely normal – not 100% at least – but he might qualify as existing on the bubble' at the fringes and outer edges of what the society considers normal. That is to say, in all other respects of his life he conforms admirably to acceptable normal behavior. Only in this one aspect of his life does he differ from anyone else. And then we could say that this one small idiosyncrasy is not enough to brand him asabnormal.' Every man is permitted his small quirks and follies, after all.
On the other hand that scenario doesn't seem very likely to me. It is possible but improbable. Far more likely is the scenario of the wild-eyed loner, the strange, unsociable, abnormal `lone wolf' who feeds his own fantasies and bizarre tastes, shamefully, telling himself weird unwholesome stories.
The process of telling unusual tales as a hobby or avocation is well known in history. I suppose if we look back in time before the current commercial world developed, before all literary ambitions were subsumed into the vortex of commercial publishing, we would find that the idea that someone would want to `tell tales' and spin yarns for publication and profit might strike everyone as a little bit nutty.
And yet I can't somehow get beyond the idea that everyone who tells tales would want an audience to hear them. Nor can I get beyond the idea that everyone who wants to tell tales began as a member of the audience listening to someone else tell tales, and it was only out of his own enjoyment of hearing tales told that he conceived the idea of telling his own or repeating those tales he had heard earlier.
(Composed by dictation Tuesday 23 September 2008)
