Loss of Faith is Growth.

We could not see anything at all until an artist came along and taught us how to see that way.

I wish that I could be a thinking stone.

Just when I think I'm feeling confident that I know what's going on in this class we get thrown a curveball. I've had a lot of epiphanies this semester, or at least I think I have, but the idea of getting rid of imagination frankly makes me rather angry. I have enough trouble being imaginative as it is...you would think that would mean that I wouldn't mind giving it up but no...I feel like I can't, like I won't be creative enough if I give up imagination. Not that I feel as though I'm brimming with creativity as it is right now.

"The romantic exists in precision as well as in imprecision."

That's one of the adages that caught my eye, and it's a little bit of an insight for me as well. I like things to be just-so, and it's very frustrating when they're not. Just taking my thoughts and throwing them out onto my blog is difficult because of this, but my semester has been so hectic that doing anything more than that is nigh impossible. So I've been putting it off and convincing myself "I'll blog tomorrow, when I have some free time."

Yesterday I was having a conversation with my otter about epilogues in stories. My personal thought is that epilogues are rarely necessary to the story, and serve only as a sequel hook or a way to show that the couple did get married in the end and had eighteen children. I don't care what happens after most stories and I don't understand, if that information is so important, why the writer doesn't just make it a part of the story.

This is where the conversation segued off and we started talking about our own stories (we are both writers, or at least try to think we are). My otter mentioned that he would like to write a whole series of books set in the world he's building now, and I realized then that the idea of having a sequel to the story I'm writing now had never even occurred to me. In fact, I don't think I could write a sequel. I'm loving the Lucretian elements that I've been finding to pull in and it's been a great joy (and a challenge) to see things start to take shape, plotwise, in this setting that's been brewing in my head for a while, but I see the ending of the story, and that's where the story, well, ends.

I'm stuck on the idea of How to Live. What to Do. It adds a very satisfying ending, I think, to the piece. The problem is that there's this whole new world that has just opened up in front of these characters (and me) and I have no idea what will happen. I just don't. As much as I'm loving the idea of being able to throw off everything old, all of your illusions and preconceptions and notions of the way life should be, I have absolutely no idea what should happen after that...

"The man who asks questions seeks only to reach a point where it will no longer be necessary for him to ask questions."

That describes me in a nutshell.

So how do I stop asking?