The Roads Not Travelled

By
Marc Olmsted
on July 17, 2008 10:45 AM | | Comments (2)

.BruegelEakins.jpg

The boxing match is via Eakins, the peasant wedding beneath it is via Brueghel the Elder.

This is one of those Hy-Arts that provoke wild meanderings in my brain. I wonder whether the spectators at the boxing match might be reincarnations of the peasants at the wedding below, and if it is their energy that directed me to find these two completely disparate works to conjoin.

I wonder at the life of the baker carrying the pies in with his co-worker, I wonder about the functionary scoring the fight, at the boxer himself. I wonder what the painters wondered when they painted these subjects. I wonder at  time and dimension and art and how little we really understand. Are all things happening at all moments?  Maybe I should have been a physicist. I can certainly add that to long, long list of alternative paths I might have taken. Here a few of those might-have-been scenarios:

1) I went to Yale School of Drama, and became a New York City-based director and playwright.

2) I went to Columbia School of Journalism and became a foreign correspondent.

3) I went to Middlebury, became a Professor of French Language and Literature and had a career in academia.

4) I stayed in France, inherited my grandfather's shirt store, and created a successful chain of them across Southern France.

5) I went to McGill, fell in love with Montreal and did something combining all of the above--perhaps a career in linguistics.

The funny thing is that I can't imagine having taken any of these routes without having eventually been drawn to L.A. (or Paris maybe) to try a career out in screenwriting. I can't imagine not having become HIV-positive, because I was a tramp in 1980-82 when I got the virus. And I would have had the same taste for intoxicating substances in any case. So it would seem that no matter what my trajectory, I might well have ended up pretty much where I am, doing exactly what I'm doing,  writing this very blog entry (though perhaps in French), simply with some different ex-boyfriends to remember. I find this thought oddly comforting.

Dare I make this a meme?  What are your top 5 alternate untravelled roads?

 
MCO 2008

 

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2 Comments

By Wayward Son on July 17, 2008 12:53 PM

Why not meme the next five roads you going to travel. It's way better than the could, woulda, shoulda trap that I tend to fall into when I go there. I suppose i could take my own advice and write my five next roads to travel..... naaaah.

By Marc OlmstedAuthor Profile Page on July 17, 2008 1:15 PM

I so disagree! If I map out the 5 roads I intend to travel, I will be lucky to follow one of them, and feel about my failed intentions, whereas to realize my five alternate paths would have led me here anyway is the opposite of "shoulda-woulda-coulda."