Every life starts on a path, a trunk, a baseline. Our temperament defines this path, our experiences are a result of our tendencies. And all of this could be graphed fractally, that is, as a fractal.
Jacob H. Hansen was a farmer born in Omaha, Nebraska. He stayed his whole life in Omaha, never saw the shore, and yet each decision he made, from marrying Natalya Hansen nee Farlen, to choosing two eggs for breakfast with two pieces of toast and a rasher of bacon at the age of twenty-two and eating this nearly every day for the rest of his life, was representative of his phlegmatic, rational choices.
The smaller branches of the fractal of his life were the wrong decisions he made before making the right ones, courting his second cousin Winnifred, trying cream of wheat for a number of years during his adolescence… These decisions were backtracked upon and rewritten in the course of time, in a new branch elongating and backtracking…
Of course someone like Jacob H. Hansen will not have as extreme a fractalized graph of their moral temperament and life-decisions as someone like Byron. But perhaps there is as simple a beauty in Hansen’s life as there is in Byron’s, although the human in us prefers the more extreme, sublime rendering of truth.
To live a life like Byron, shorter than Hansen’s, is to create a much broader fractal, one that is not confined to one’s own experience of existence, but lives on for as long as people remember his work and understand it as an expression of love. These graphings are not as thick as the baseline of Byron’s own life, but they are spread out diversely, as the arms and branches and twigs of a great oak tree, stemming from that base that stopped growing along the z-axis of time nearly two hundred years ago. But now branches and twigs are long enough that they have formed their own trunks, and this is where the metaphor falls flat because it is not possible for an oak tree to have branches thicker and stronger than its very trunk—only in a fractal is such a plotting possible, and here is a branch much stronger than Byron’s own life, which is Byronology.
Of course the naturalists among us may claim that Byronology is not as strong as the original branch of Byron’s life based on the inherent fact that Byron’s life served as the baseline for the very study of his life. For without Byron’s life, Byronology would not exist, and that in and of itself is worth noting, and is correct, in a sense. The self-similarity of Byronology and Byron’s life are what make the fractal in and of itself, a fractal.
The question I wrestle with is what kind of life to live. The kind that grows after your death or the kind that shrinks?
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