Nora - where's your Darkness now? Now you believe in a world where our discussion here - does what, exactly? Sounds to me like there's no great certainty a problem even exists - sort of a leap to assume we're going to help with solving it through talk. Sounds like pride to me - inflated opinion of the importance of one's opinions and impacts on the world.
Me writing darker things has little to do with my usual personality, which has little to do with my opinions, world views and hopes.
If you knew me, you probably wouldn't dream to imagine me as a writer of pseudo-dark stuff. And reading me, you probably are miles from guessing my deep political hopes.
However I only have to look down on my short adult life, to see the revolutions my thoughts and hopes and dreams went though, my new appreciation for some different values and rules.
I went out of my comfort zone, saw how some other countries dealt with other issues, lived under different rules, and hence rubbed elbows with people who had some drastically different thoughts from mine, and got into passionate conversations and insightful tales and encounters. Stuff I thought was myth came out of the darkness of the world and showed its ugly face.
All this made me change a lot. I'm not the same person I was when I left France, and I want nothing of that old life back.
So tomorrow, faced with a choice, I'm not sure I'd act the same way now than I would have 4 years ago.
It's all small ripples. Which conversation, or which dispute, turned my thoughts to different ends? Can anyone feel responsible for the complex changes my personality has undertaken? I don't think so.
Deep down I'm a pessimist. I think we're reaching the top of the bell curve and our specie will collapse sooner rather than later, and the world will be better for it. I think our lives are led without purpose or goal or meaning, and that there is nothing to come after our death but return to the nothingness that was there before our life began.
It's scary yet freeing, and maybe it's what you see reflected in my stories, but it in no way means I don't believe in the power of conversation.
What do you think started most assassinations, most coups, most revolutions? People voting? Pah! You misunderstand me.
I'm
French. We invented the beheading of royalty.
People talked, they hungered. Do you know what even started the revolution? It was Louis XVI's smart idea to open a national discussion of the problems of the people, clergy and nobility, and gather the representatives in assembly.
He wanted to do good. He was a smart man. Actually perfected the design of the guillotine himself, from the inefficient crescent blade to the one you know and which severed his own neck.
The thing is, the people of France were invited to gather in their villages and go to the man at the public desk, and tell him their grievances, for them to be talked off in the Assembly.
It was like a bum, lifting his own clothes, and suddenly, instead of only scratching himself mindlessly, seeing the sores, the pustules and the gangrene eating at him.
It made people aware of all that was wrong, and it made them talk. No one voted to storm the Bastille.
And how are coups done, but by discontented people spreading their complaints and convincing arguments and gaining enough followers to take over power?
Ideas are infectious. Many books and many movies try to make that point. Actions aren't ideas, even though they can bring that about, and are in turn brought by them. Ideas are spread through written or spoken word, that's all.
So of course our chatting here can change people. I don't think it'll change me, because I don't think or classify by authors, and don't remember work by author. So ultimately I don't think I could even force myself to try. And I don't really want to.
But if it brought any of our attention to crucial topics and made us take a trip out of our comfort zone, then it has been worthwhile.