So…I’ve made it!!!
July 7th, 2007, I followed a crazy impulse and logged in to Second Life. I have already told you this: many times I wanted to log off for good.
But SL, like Scheherazade from One Thousand and one Nights, kept me from taking that decision. Every night, when I logged in swearing it was the last… SL kept involving me into this world, telling me yet another story… and I knew I had to come back for more. I just needed to know how those stories ended, but before I knew it, I was lured into the next one.
The origins of The One Thousand and One tales is remote and mysterious. It’s a multitude of stories, passed on by tradition, both oral and written. From ancient Persia, India and Arabia, but also from older cultures that date back to the Xth Century. In the XIXth Century, it became part of the Western culture as well. Translated thousands of times, along with the Bible, it’s one of the books that has been more widely known in history than anything else.
Perhaps the older form of relationship developed by mankind, once they had to join in groups to protect each other, was to sit around the fire in the safety of a cave, and tell simple stories about how they hunted, about what they discovered, about how they were dealing with enemy tribes, about how they were dealing with the world.
And that is very much how a sensible person feels when first strolling around Orientation Island Public. It’s a new unknown world, we have to learn to deal with. To survive.
Those stories were making those human beings more human.
Those stories are the origin of civilization.
I believe stories are what remind us of our humanity.
And that’s what I feel we are doing here. We are here to find our friends, our partners, our groups, and gather around a virtual fire and make a story together.
The stronger the story, the stronger the magic. And, as all good stories do, it makes us more conscious, enriches our language, it allows us to live adventures that for many reasons we can’t afford in RL. It brings joy. It makes us be better persons.
So, all the times I felt like the barbarian King Sahrigar and wanted to delete my virtual existence, SL, like Scheherazade, told me yet another story. Helped me become as human as a virtual self, as I am human in the real world.
I hope I can make it through the next 365 nights. And I hope all the people I have grown to love will still be here. We all know Scheherazade kept her head on in the end.
