The Game of Life

I've just been reading people's blogs again.

When you look around you: your family, your friends, your classmates, your teachers, colleagues, bosses, that lady who cleans up the table after you finish eating and don't return the tray; the salesgirl behind the counter of the jewelry shop you keep walking by on the way to your car; the middle-aged man sitting the air-conditioned comfort of the taxicab as you drive home from work. What do you see?

People. Faces, personas, characteristics, behaviours, psychologies, or maybe even thoughts.

I see stories.

Every single soul on this planet is a storybook. Each life is a tale, spun out of time and woven with actions, choices; sprinkled with drama and tension; bringing together a cast of loosely-related characters, each with a story of their own. Irony, imagery, comedy, tragedy; art imitates life, or the other way around?

If you could just reach out... reach out into the library of the world, and take down one of its stories, open the cover and flip through the pages. Each soul is a story, each life a book; unfinished, half-written; the final chapter written by the hooded figure with his scythe. But even without the ending, each story is unique, is exquisite; no two people's are identical. Similarities are abound, surely, yet with novels this length there can be no plagarism, no exact copies. Reach out... choose a book... and read.

As an avid reader, the idea enthralls me, enchants me... to read, to collect the stories of every single person on Earth, to see, to know... linking them all together, like a vast mystery being solved, with each passing word, sentence, chapter, slowly revealing itself. Behind every face is a new story, another facinating plot, another spellbinding tale...

And when you realise that, at the end of the day, all these stories are as fluid as water, and as irretrivable and unstoppable as the proverbial liquid in a cupped hand. Stories are ending, closing chapters being written, all over the globe, several thousand times a day, and there is no librarian, no storyteller, no loremaster; no bards, jesters, researchers, collectors... millions of stories are being lost, everyday, to Time and Death: Farenheit 451. Qin Shi Huang burned hundreds if thousands of bamboo scrolls; a paragraph compared to the collective library of the human race.

When the story ends, who will keep telling the tales?
The Edna Man