The written word. The painted picture. Life! Three mediums, and the third the only one worth having. I say the fantasy of a book and the scene of a painting are worthless if one has no grasp on life, because all mediums are predicated on living. So why do we strive for these medium, and not towards living–why make drawing the goal and not a means toward living? People like this, who say they would 'start scratching words into bark' if there was no paper, confuse me. The possession of self by novels or anime or what have you, is only possible because of who you have been formed into by living. No matter how swept up one may be in drawing, the seed of passion came from reality. Do we forget our ties so easily and callously, leaving the foundation of dreams for a mere niche of possibility?

The idea that human beings are individuals strikes me as strange. Surely, as a counter the term 'individual' computes–a bushel of wheat, an individual human–yet we are composed of billions of cells, rely on others for survival and reproduction, are social creatures who demonstrably need contact (Harlow's sad study), evolved into our intelligence via a complex ecosystem and form complex social structures within which to live our lives. As individuals we owe our past and present, and undoubtedly will owe our futures too, to markedly non-individual entities–systems. We are not self-contained, self-reliant...we are not rocks. All that's meant here is that individuality is not to stand alone: human individuality in context makes perfect sense.

Returning, then, to the idea of living in the niche of a chosen medium. We can never do it perfectly, because we need to live (and be alive, yes) to sustain pursuit of the medium. That was the argument–except that the perfect pursuit of medium requires living excellently, too. This is a contention of my experience, in any case. Living is the gateway to the medium, and the medium is also the gateway to living. Likewise, individuality is the gateway to the system and the system to individuality...One medium demands many, one individuality a group.

So comes to close a daydream–but it is already night! In the dark one fades off and will soon chase vivid dreams.

When the tortoise beat the hare...that was a turtle confident which way the finish line was.