The Wisdom of Wanderlust
I have considered starting a theater troupe on the wharves of Port Kar, thinking it might be a way to earn a living during my stay. I have a few plays suitable for street actors, the vulgar wit and sensibility appropriate for the venue. However, my relative anonymity here is something I have come to value. I am not Szol of the Poets; a whoremonger, playwright and politician here. I am merely a foreign tenant, renting a room in a tavern on a canal.
"Looking out that window...again," the Tavern Master remarks, interrupting my train of thought as he sweeps the landing below. "Writing your life story?"
"Are you lettered?" I ask him.
"And just what would I write?" he asks. "And to whom?" he says, not really answering my question.
"Do you not have thoughts or notions from time to time worth writing down," I ask, "for the sake of prosperity?"
"Anything thought up worth rememberin'," he says to me, "doesn't need to be written down."
I smile, outmaneuvered by the logic of a Tavern Master once more. I see no need to debate the merit of my argument further. I see him as a teacher, someone to learn from, a mentor of sorts. Like Rufus the Player, now Rufus the Vagrant holding court in a narrow Anbar alley, there to impart wisdom to anyone willing to sit across a Kaissa board from him for the price of a moment in time, the Tavern Master is a wise man. Wisdom, you see, has many faces, many names. I have spent a fair amount of time perusing the dusty shelves of Ar's library, but gleaned only a finite measure concerning the nature of men, or the nature of myself in doing so. This is why I wander.
It is a sad irony that I am never truer to myself, never truer to my caste, than when I wander, when I roam afield from the city of my birth, the city I love.
It is a sad irony that I am never truer to myself, never truer to my caste, than when I wander, when I roam afield from the city of my birth, the city I love.
