Topical Ointment

Has everything already been written about? No. New technological innovations enrich our lives, and science fiction will always have something new to discuss. Those historical events which have yet to come have not yet been written about. Fantastic settings yet to be created burble and simmer in the fecund minds of children and adults, bare daydreams brushing against different worlds. So long as people continue to be, there will always be something new to write about.

And yet, these will rehash the same themes. Someone once told me that there are only four things you can write about, and I only remember two: love and journeys. I suppose discovery would be three, and four might be lost love? Whatever the four overarching themes, they reflect the core of human existence, or human existence as we have come to define it over the course of our collective existence. So, yes, everything has already been discussed.

Not everything has been exhausted. People still write, contributing to the human experience. Not a rehash of the old topics, but new twists on the age old themes. Consider homosexual literature. Society has never quite accepted homosexuality. Same-sex erotica, judging by the bowed bookshelves lining small D.C. bookstores, is burgeoning and more widespread than it would have been two hundred years ago. Though the same topic (love, lost love), it introduces new facets to the jewel of literature. Has there ever been a society before that pseudo-celebrated lesbians (aside from the celebration of Sappho of Lesbos)?

We all view things differently in our lives, perhaps by necessity, for without that diversity of opinion and judgment, we would all fall into the same pigeonholes, become as vanilla as ice cream. At the same time, all of our viewpoints are quite important, for they are unique, and shall pass from the earth along with you (and yes, you will die. Having had to drive with a 16 year old who won’t die has only affirmed to me my all-too-real mortality). People sometimes think that they have nothing interesting to contribute to the canon, if there even exists a canon. Bullcrap. All of us has something to contribute if only we are brave enough to make an attempt to contribute, to write, to express, to create.