Heinlein to Helprin, Heaven to Hell

   I've been told by a handful of people that I should be a blogger.  That information, unsolicited as it was, left me with the odd impression of being unable to tell if they resembled more a Greek holding hemlock telling me I should be the next Socrates, or a king holding a belled hat telling me I should be a fool.
   Slowly I have let myself get dragged into the communication medium over the internet, more and more each year.  First it was email, so convenient.  Then came Facebook, with all it's pictures, gadgets, and forgotten friends.  And now I have finally succumbed to the idea of a blog.

  Now, the question is, what do I do with this thing, this blog, this behemoth from the virtual deep?

   Naturally, I am expected to write on subjects wide and varied, bestowing those bits of wisdom I possess (whatever they are) upon those to whom I am close and who influenced me to begin with.  Problem is, I doubt anyone will want to take credit for influencing me, at least after reading this.  Further, it leaves me staring into that bleak and terrible black void whence I must pull the wisdom of the ages, dissecting, directing, dicing and slicing, preparing, and presenting those thoughts to be absorbed by you, by all-important reader, in manageable doses.  (I shall have to watch the lengths of my posts- the surgeon general says I'm not harmful to your health in small doses, but he refused to comment on excessive exposure.) 
   The question is, of course, on what should I write?  I doubt you have any interest at all in what I have to say, and, if for some reason you do, you are either delusional, misinformed, desperate, or a priest in a confessional.  Thus, since I haven't the desire to talk about myself, I can use this for one of my favorite things; talking about others.  Yes, I have a tendency to do that.  Sort of a nosy habit of mine, like checking to see what food you're saving in the fridge.  I tend to enjoy talking about good people, like Patton, or great people, like Roland.  (Incidentally, I would love to have dinner with these two, both at once.  Talk about crazy conversation.)  I like to talk about the bad, like Smerdyakov, and the brilliant, like Lawrence.  Further, foremost, and final, I like to talk about those who I have no clue what to do with.  (Ivan Karamazov, for example)
   Preferably, I write in response to stimuli.  Thus, if you have a great thought or quote you want to talk about, I will jump at the chance.  (I would also jump at the chance to talk to anyone who understands the name of this blog, but that's for another post.  There, I've already committed one of the blogging cliches, putting things off  'for another post.') 
   To scratch my mental itch(it's kind of like lice of the brain, you get these little things crawling all over your mind that you can't catch and don't really know how they got there, and all you can do is scratch), I get to try something I've never tried before- define what I read.

   Heaven help me.

   To begin with, I've always loved fantasy(as well as science fiction) of the first degree, namely, that uncorrupted by a focus towards the fantastic for the sake of the fantastic, but, rather, for the sake of the true.  I defy you to hold up a Paolini book and equate it with, say, the saga of Beren and Luthien.  So too do I fell towards the million of Star Wars or Halo books next to Lewis' Space Trilogy, or Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers.'  In this light of their purpose, I would say 'Science Fiction' is one and the same as 'Fantasy,' not separate, not even a subset.  (Just try, please, and pick with which of those two you would classify the Space Trilogy)  As Lewis so eloquently puts it, "sometimes fairy stories may say best what's to be said."
   Further, I love the old.  Generally, that which is a thousand or more years old survived for us to read simply because it is worth reading.  (Maybe not correct, but worth reading.)  Whether it is Beowulf or Cicero, I'd be more than willing to read it.  I can then note that Roman tabloids from the dying empire aren't that great, and Cicero sounds a lot like (surprise, surprise) a politician and a lawyer, albeit a bit more eloquent.  (Alright, a lot more eloquent, but he was sure a pain to translate.)  Beowulf?  I reread it all the time. 
   The not so old, but old... well, I like to read most of it yes, from Marx to Metternich, but I'm wary of their thoughts.  Not that the general writing was worse, it just so happened more of it got saved. But then again, Shakespeare can't be beat, unless just maybe by Dante.  And throw in Goethe's 'Faust' for good measure.  Dostoevsky puts in a damn good voice from mother Russia, as well.  
   And now, finally, we reach the chaos of the modern, the new.  What does one do with the plethora of books that now clog the shelves of used book stores?  I've learned the mark of a good book is one you can read many times, gaining more pleasure each successive reading.  That tends to knock out those books that get read once and donated to the shop around the corner.  The greatest of the new (say, the past few decades)  can be spotted easily using this rudimentary criteria.  So I say thank you, Helprin, Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton, Waugh, Shaw, Rommel, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and many others for countless hours of enjoyment and growth, for me and my friends.  I wish I could have you post on here (Helprin's still around..... who knows?), for you could say things far more clearly, concisely, and eloquently than I. 
   Though I can't get you to say something new here, I can have you say what you have already said.  And for this again, I thank you.

           And I promised myself I wouldn't ramble.....