Speech and Vanity
November 16, 2011 by Chrystian Guy • Chrystian Guy
Having decided to recompose my blog, it occured to me that I needed to question my own vanity or, at the very least, the inutility of our opinions. Opinions are useless because seldom are the occasions when one’s opinion would change ours. Useless also because most opinions are badly expressed or even badly constructed.
I do not see myself expressing my opinions here, or if I did, I would not pretend to have some moral or social authority. I just want to tell stories. Crystallize fragments of life. Tell without saying.
Is this vanity? A little. Narcissism? Certainly. Human? Absolutely! Since at least the era of the Lascaux paintings, humans have wanted to tell stories. Language has not allowed for the invention of story telling; the need to tell stories has called for the invention of human speech.
This blog is founded around the words of a popular French Canadian poet, Paul Piché, that I freely translate here: “Me, I just tell stories. Stories that you have told me. I tell them again in my own fashion, but alone I cannot invent them.”
