JustNathan.com

Just Nathan

A musical offering, in parts
October 06, 2002
What the pictures tell me

I spent some time today writing text for my new personal web site, JustNathan.com - I'm still not sure why I'm doing it, as it's bound to be oversentimental, self-indulgent and offensive to those closest to me.

The text was hard enough to write, and I found the style difficult. I opened a box of photographs and sifted through them to find pictures that could be scanned to illustrate some of the text. After ten minutes I found myself in tears as I saw pictures of my younger brother, his wife and children, who are growing up without a family.

All those pictures of Scotland, Japan, Germany, America, Mexico, Peru, friends, family, loved ones. Only fifteen years have passed since the earliest snap in the box, and we are all so old, and some of us faded or dead. I couldn't stop crying.

The introspection of the exercise has robbed me of any levity which remained when I started in so foolhardy a fashion a fortnight ago. The text reads as over-earnest, and perhaps reads for that reason as insincere, a pose.

I listened to my Solti Maher 3 - it lifted me beyond the cares of the world, to a place where intellect and nature fuse in joyous harmony.

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I've reproduced the text I composed for the home page, just in case I remove it from there.

Thank you for visiting JustNathan. I've written the first version of the text for this web site in early October 2002.

JustNathan may come across as being rather self-indulgent, oversentimental, and telling you more than you may wish to know about my thoughts, interests, my family and friends. If so, I apologise. I realised as I was writing that you will receive a somewhat distorted view of me. This partly reflects my view at the moment, and is perhaps also a function of the introspection caused by the need to write and, particularly to summarise my life to date. Some of it hurts, but I'll let you work out what - it's not all obvious. A former manager called me "intellectually terrifying". I felt that to be less than perspicacious, and didn't reflect the true balance between my heart and head.

Reading this myself, some trends seem apparent:
- The influence I have had from people such as Gustav Mahler, Jeremy Rosen, Tom Stoppard, Douglas R Hofstadter and Mario Vargas Llosa (see the connection?)
- Sentimentality and romanticism (how does that fit in the classical versus romantic scale, given my earlier comment?)
- Questioning of orthodoxy in thought of all sorts, including politics and religion. But is that free-thinking?
- How important is the "gay thing" really in my life?
- Given to too many highbrow pursuits (I assure you that is a distortion)
- If I describe myself as "a Jewish eclectic iconoclast", how much of that is real, and how much a pose? And can I distinguish that myself?

And I'm probably rather too fond of D minor. Entartete Kunst, indeed.

Anyway, I suggest that you either use the little "x" in the top right hand corner of your screen or read, decide for yourself, and perhaps correspond with me. After all, JustNathan is merely another human being sharing your planet and the air that you breathe. Probably.

JustNathan
6th October 2002

Posted by nathan at October 6, 2002 07:45 PM


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