Have you ever watched something get built from scratch? Precursors included; packaged convenience left entirely by the wayside?
Have you ever thrown out an idea because the very tower of necessaries that must be made aforehand seems to grow at a rate greater than your ability to make them? Have you ever sacrificed the correct assemblage of a thing in favor of a pre-existing solution? The "what can you do?" excuse is there, always waiting to slick its tongue in the door when the finite nature of one's time on earth is weighed against the laundry list of one's self-appointed tasks.
However tempting it may be to decry the toil of The Right Thing, it is still right. However much of a bargain The Cheap Thing1 may present, it is still a bad bargain if it leaves The Right Thing behind.
Building from scratch is an awesome difficulty. It is also one of the few things worth doing in a world where most have spent their lives contributing to cheap, wrong, packaged convenience rather than the paving of correct steps towards actual goals2.
Let us witness, then, the triumphs of one Mircea Mircescu:
My own poor Grenadine was nearly deafened by the trumpets of her fellow's several successive victories. Were she not obliged to offer a vivat and quaff a spot of Alchemist's Cheap Gin each time, she might've even been lucid enough to have achieved something, herself!
The ranking of pots won over the past thirty days. I hear Daniel Barron is looking to break into the carabiner market.
Perhaps it could be said that it's easier for a virtual man to build himself such glories from scratch than for a man of meat. Mircescu, ostensibly, felt no pangs of the stomach or loins3, had no consideration for sleep or toothache, and was never interrupted by blitzes of Sprint vs. MCI callcenter rate offers.
Nevertheless, he was still obliged to pull grass from the earth until there was enough with which to make rope. To use rope to haul in flotsam from the shore until it could be worked with other such trifles, just as hardly won, to make tools. Solely to make the further purchase of trifling items more practicable. Eulora's seemingly oppressive chain of requisites for anything resembling progress is as a poem for reality. Removed from the hard fact of actually bleeding fingers as felt in the world beyond the borders of the screen, its world permits a more visible, paradoxically more tangible, affair between right and reward.
Not that it's any clearer what The Right Thing is. But Mircescu seems to have a decent hunch. And he ought to be celebrated.
Huzzah!
* * *
- The Wrong Thing may be just as toilsome, and so employed as a result of confusion, or of outright malice. The Cheap Thing, and look that it's not even properly codified, the insidious bastard, isn't necessarily wrong, it's just necessarily less toilsome. The fact that what is Cheap is often also Wrong is the only true evil I know, and the principal problem of anyone attempting to move rationally through their existence. [↩]
- I do not pretend to have, nor do I imagine I ever will, fully digest or even be entirely aware of the work of human history's exceptions. The sentiment is rather born of the experience of "modern living", inasmuch as that means the very state of having to trudge through ever-enthickening swamps of "solutions" that are nothing like solutions at all. [↩]
- Though I hear something along these lines is being brewed for implementation. [↩]
