Try this:
In a small, poor and seldom visited South American country, an incomplete git, of discreetly decrepit middle age, has the good fortune to land a job teaching English in a state university with an extensive, attractively wooded campus, inhabited by iguanas, moths and finches. Some years later, he is sitting in the car (a Chevy Aveo) at 7 a.m., half an hour before his first class of the day, in an empty car park under the hazy early morning sunshine, picking his nose, cursing the locked door of the Gents' Toilets, and wondering, for the thousandth time, what to do with all these Ideas.
Having Ideas has always been his dominant vice. If the ideas were any good, he would probably not regard having them as a vice, but instead as something of a gift; if all of them were self-evidently bad, then they would presumably not have become a vice in the first place. The trouble with his Ideas is that they are none of them clearly one or the other. For most of his life, several of his Ideas were not even on speaking terms with one another: lately, at least, they seem to have arranged themselves into something resembling a coherent world view, if so grand a term can be applied to something so vague, so insubstantial and fleeting. Fleeting, because the incomplete git does not expect to be around for much longer. Given his terminal illness and the unshakeable bad habits that are precipitating him towards the grave, both the ideas and the mind behind them would be ill advised to make any long term plans. So, once again, he asks: what do I do with all this Stuff?
Stuff. By which we are to understand perhaps a little more than just ideas. As a teacher, the Incomplete Git has long since sorted his own biography into, roughly: Classroom-friendly Anecdotes (usually with a Moral), Embarrassing Secrets, Reasons why I'm Like This (there being considerable overlap between the last two categories), and finally, Inconsequential but Oddly Emotionally Comforting Recollections. He does not suppose that much of this will be of interest to other people: the experience of being married provides him with daily reminders of how unfascinating an appearance he presents to the world (his present wife is interested in his Past only insofar as it contains Women, which it does, but not to an especially impressive or heroic degree). Nevertheless, faced with his own imminent demise, a niggling instinct tells him he should be backing up the data on his internal hard drive, putting it Out There, thus affording other people with more time and patience than he has the opportunity to sift through the jetsam and pick out anything that may be of some value.
For the possibility that an entire life of fifty-five years may end up being of no earthly use to anyone (beyond that of offering monetary support to a family) seems a little hard to take.
At the very least, he reasons, there may come a time when his son (currently 8 years old, diagnosed with autism, and a speaker of acceptable Spanish but extremely rudimentary English) might reasonably feel some curiosity about how that long-deceased progenitor thought about stuff, and may therefore want to read anything that he, in moments of uncharacteristic incautiousness, actually wrote (and didn't delete a few days later after Quality Control got a look at it).
Actually, it's a little more urgent than that. The disease that is him, the Incomplete Git, facing extinction, wants to be kept alive, even if only in a corked test tube on some windswept Research Facility, in the hope of one day, in the far distant future, being accidentally released, infecting another mind and bringing these long dormant Feelings back to life in another host. And to look around and find himself, apparently, surrounded by people who have given up on thinking or feeling anything at all, save what is Politically Correct and Permitted, and therefore within the purview only of non-Gits or of Complete ones, makes him wish to infect someone else all the more.
Having Ideas has always been his dominant vice. If the ideas were any good, he would probably not regard having them as a vice, but instead as something of a gift; if all of them were self-evidently bad, then they would presumably not have become a vice in the first place. The trouble with his Ideas is that they are none of them clearly one or the other. For most of his life, several of his Ideas were not even on speaking terms with one another: lately, at least, they seem to have arranged themselves into something resembling a coherent world view, if so grand a term can be applied to something so vague, so insubstantial and fleeting. Fleeting, because the incomplete git does not expect to be around for much longer. Given his terminal illness and the unshakeable bad habits that are precipitating him towards the grave, both the ideas and the mind behind them would be ill advised to make any long term plans. So, once again, he asks: what do I do with all this Stuff?
Stuff. By which we are to understand perhaps a little more than just ideas. As a teacher, the Incomplete Git has long since sorted his own biography into, roughly: Classroom-friendly Anecdotes (usually with a Moral), Embarrassing Secrets, Reasons why I'm Like This (there being considerable overlap between the last two categories), and finally, Inconsequential but Oddly Emotionally Comforting Recollections. He does not suppose that much of this will be of interest to other people: the experience of being married provides him with daily reminders of how unfascinating an appearance he presents to the world (his present wife is interested in his Past only insofar as it contains Women, which it does, but not to an especially impressive or heroic degree). Nevertheless, faced with his own imminent demise, a niggling instinct tells him he should be backing up the data on his internal hard drive, putting it Out There, thus affording other people with more time and patience than he has the opportunity to sift through the jetsam and pick out anything that may be of some value.
For the possibility that an entire life of fifty-five years may end up being of no earthly use to anyone (beyond that of offering monetary support to a family) seems a little hard to take.
At the very least, he reasons, there may come a time when his son (currently 8 years old, diagnosed with autism, and a speaker of acceptable Spanish but extremely rudimentary English) might reasonably feel some curiosity about how that long-deceased progenitor thought about stuff, and may therefore want to read anything that he, in moments of uncharacteristic incautiousness, actually wrote (and didn't delete a few days later after Quality Control got a look at it).
Actually, it's a little more urgent than that. The disease that is him, the Incomplete Git, facing extinction, wants to be kept alive, even if only in a corked test tube on some windswept Research Facility, in the hope of one day, in the far distant future, being accidentally released, infecting another mind and bringing these long dormant Feelings back to life in another host. And to look around and find himself, apparently, surrounded by people who have given up on thinking or feeling anything at all, save what is Politically Correct and Permitted, and therefore within the purview only of non-Gits or of Complete ones, makes him wish to infect someone else all the more.
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