What If...?

A couple of days ago, I started reading the newest book by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. It's good. Slow at the beginning because it's more about building the world than about major plot, which is the way many of their trilogies start. Now that I'm almost finished, the book has built to a point where it was hard for me to put it down, but I promised my brother that I'd find his monkey comics, and figured I'd better do it before I forgot.

Writing about the book wasn't really what I wanted to say, though. It's just a way to get on to the point. See in this book--which is fantasy, of course--the mages are also the holy men, the ones who commune with the Gods and value knowledge and wisdom. If the king in the books wasn't a scholar who loved his books, the mages would keep and revere the library. All mages, from novices to masters can be seen in the library reading the books and scribbling notes on sheets of vellum.

This got me to think about history.

I think that if I had been born a thousand or so years ago, I would have tried to become a monk of some kind. I hope that, born in that time period, I'd have the curiosity that I have now, wanting to know "Why?" about nearly everything. I've been imagining myself curled over a large oak desk, stained with years of wax dripped from candles, reading a huge tome filled with things I'd never imagined. I get careless with my own candle, dripping wax on the book, smearing it in my haste to clean the page. And then I scribble something down on a piece of something, anything at hand, maybe my hand. I think I'm clever, I've seen a connection that no one else has. I'm not sure how deep my faith in a higher power is, but I need some to continue to be around more knowledge than the average person could imagine.

It's not the greatest fantasy, I know, but it's an honest one. I don't hold to the illusions that time back then was really better for anyone (I like running water), but I like to think that instead of being a pushover--like the average person in any time period--I'd work to learn and understand and think; that I would have sought out the priest hood so I could do this learning.

Is that what would have happened? I don't know. Part of me doubts it and thinks I would be stuck doing what ever my father did before me.

It's fun to imagine.