I am a....

[grinninfoole]

Is anyone else as puzzled as I regarding the appeal of the many "What ______ are you?" tests that many people seem to be citing in their journals? I actually find it slightly exasperating, which is unfair, really, and I'm not sure why. Certainly, I don't want anyone to feel bad about being amused or interested in something so innocuous. Yet, in the semi-privacy of my heart, I say to myself: What is the deal with these things?

One obvious notion is that the tests appeal to people who don't know who they really are. I shouldn't like to be too quick to assert that I do know, but part of the reason this occurs to me is that I have a sense that I DO know who I am, even if I can't quite say.

I suppose that, if I were a B5 character, the Vorlon question wouldn't stump me half so much as the Shadow question: what do I want? (Is the answer 43? Dammit, where's my magic Bonnieball when I need it??)

Comments

Re: hitchhikers guide??

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

I once read an interesting insight into the difference between classical tragedy and modern tragedy. I can't find the passage right now, though I think it appears in Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire. If I could get to my closet, I check the copy I have set aside to give out as a gift some time. Anyway, for the Greeks, tragedy derived from a character flaw, a conflict between impulses (even entirely virtuous ones) that led the hero to choose his own destruction. Today, tragedy might best be envisioned as a combination of circumstances, choices made in the absence of full knowledge, that lead to narrower and narrower ranges of options, until, at the moment of crisis, one has no options left, and disaster ensues. MacLean's book, about Smokejumpers and the Mann Gulch fire of 1949, is predicated on this view, as are Walter Lord's two studies of the Titanic, A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On. (In fact, it maybe the latter of these where I first saw this idea.) Anyway, I'm not sure how this connects to fate. Who is to blame for the things that go wrong in life? Or for the things that go right?

I guess that I don't know my own personal legend, or I at least don't really embrace it. Something to work to change.

I don't know what the soul is (or what you mean by it, anyway) so I don't know that I agree that everyone has one. In the Aristotelian sense, yes, we do, but if one links the soul to conscience, to a sense of empathy and self-evaluation, it seems clear that we don't all have one, as a belief that only the self and its experiences are real is common to sociopaths. Put more plainly, folks like Jeffery Dahmer don't see other people as real, and thus their suffering elicits no more sympathy than Wile E. Coyote. Do such people have a conscience? Do they have a soul? Are they really people at all? (I would argue that, except in a biological sense, no, they are not.)

What sort of theology interests you? What sort of stories do you like to read?