[HerenIstarion]

Thanks for all the entries, lads and lassies, it was great to learn a bit more about you, besides and behind of what shows up on the screen. The next direction I’m keen on pushing the thread to is mainly due to impression I’ve got whilst reading (and thinking, yeh, me sometimes does that too) your postings. To use old cliche, are you (me, we) butterflies who dream they are philosophers, or vice versa, philosophers sometimes thinking they are butterflies? I know, that is quite battered question, but it is very interesting how it is refracted in each an individual case

What I termed like mask in the beginning of the thread is better re-termed as ‘role’, I suppose. For it comes down to masks upon masks when one takes a closer look. And there is no telling which one is the ‘true’ one. Let me clarify myself - I’ve got an impression we all (or almost all?) are playing games here. Verily, if you are not you as you are elsewhere, it is because you are playing, assuming a role? But that’s what I (we?) do all the time in so called ‘real’ life too. People seem flexible enough to assume roles whilst reacting to other people, and it seems they usually guess what is the role which is expected from them readily. But if each and every moment of one’s life one is ‘acting’, who is to say which pose is more real and important? And here we are down to essence of this post:

I know that comparison is what usually makes things hot. The usual way of praising poet, alas, is to dig up some other poet and say: this dude is better that that one. But I always felt there is something wrong, merely incorrect, about that way. So I won’t ask you if you consider one more important than another. I just would like to know if you consider your virtual role important at all, and in what way.

To give a personal example I may risk sounding a bit mental, but I would like to confess that daily (that is, when I can afford it, which I try, I do) visit I pay you here is as important (and when some livid discussion is on even more important, as I would not do discussing on the expense of my office hours, if it were not so) to me as my job, as my ‘real time’ friends, and many things more. After all, nobody but you fellows is keen on discussing Tolkien and they feel unsure of their footing when I try to have a go at them with some abstruse piece of applicability issue with regards of orkish soul and original sin. But however distinct H-I and GL may seem, it was a bit of a joke to say they are different persons, so I better rewrite it to say – H-I and GL are both parts of what I call ‘me’ – i.e. strange bunch of feelings, memories, thoughts, odd knowledge and ambition, which would feel incomplete, if the niche were not filled with Barrow Downs