A Visit and a Story

It's a cloudy, rainy, sombre day. I only woke up at around two o'clock, though I had gone to sleep at around midnight, perhaps because I hadn't slept very well.

But when I did wake up, my aunt S. came for a visit, followed by uncle W. and my cousin A. Over cake and coffee, we talked about German television (the crime shows Tatort and Ein Fall für Zwei, people's-judge and Jerry-Springer-type shows, as well as the American-Idol-imitation Deutschland Sucht den Superstar), Japanese animé and culture in general, literature in school (Gi. and Ge. have to read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf), shao lin, etc.

Now Papa and Mama, perhaps with help from Gi. or Ge., are setting up the metal storage boxes that we will use to hold art supplies, papers inherited from our grandfather, and other odds and ends left in our moving boxes.

In the meantime I am revolving a new story idea in my mind. The main character, based on one of the students at UBC who seemed quite unusual and interesting, is the scion of the royal family of an imaginary country. His parents were killed by radicals in the eighties, so he is being raised by his grandparents in a sort of "splendid isolation" in their large, rambling rural house. This house, to be precise, is located on the northern shore of Elk Lake (I have a specific one in mind; a light brown one surrounded by cottonwoods, perceptible in the distance from Brookleigh Rd.), in Victoria. His grandparents are very aristocratic in their tastes; they have the best food, listen to the best music, read the best books, and so on and so forth, trying in essence to live their lives as if they were still in Europe. So their grandchild's existence is completely out of touch with the surroundings, though he is intelligent, well-read, and he has many interests. He goes to a normal school (I need to figure out some reason why he wouldn't go to a private school, which I don't want to describe because I don't know what it's like), and, while respected by everyone, keeps mostly to himself. Then one or both of the grandparents die(s) during the main character's last year in school. And then he enters university, intending to study medicine. That's as far as I've gotten.

To be quite clear, I'm not killing off so many characters to add superficial excitement, and I certainly hope that I won't write about it callously. It is simply easier to write about the difficulties of life if they have a tangible cause; I think that many people only understand trouble if it comes in the shape of a bad relationship, death, poverty, or disease. I, on the other hand, agree with George Eliot's comment in the Mill on the Floss that the sorrows of childhood, even from trivial causes by adult standards, are as real and severe to a child as any other. Or, to quote Shakespeare, "The poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporeal suffering feels a pang as great / As when a giant dies." But in this case I think that outright tragedy -- though not in the simplified and etherealized form common in theatre -- is permissible.