Ideas up for grabs
Introduction
It is Whit Monday, May 16, 2005 -- a holiday in newly Christian
postcommunist Hungary. I'm trying to revive an old Toshiba notebook,
model T1910, not used for seven years. It was originally ours, then
hers, then both of us purchased more powerful desktops, finally, in
the course of cleaning up, I inherited it. And finally now, when my
main computer does housecleaning (defragmentation, usually lasting for
half a day, since the hard drive measures in gigabytes now), I realized
it's time to get back to my old friend.
I'm working as many other writers, essayists and memoirs authors,
with the computer in my lap, in a cosy corner, writing as the thoughts
come to my mind. (Sorry for the errors, it just doesn't seem to be
right if I stop writing to weed these errors; the clock won't stop
ticking, the heart won't stop beating, the airplanes won't stop flying
-- or the whole project will never end succcessfully.)
Why am I writing this, what do I want to accomplish? Well, on the one
hand this is going to be my number-one project for my retired years,
the thing I can become involved in before I die. On the other hand,
this is my desperate attempt to sum up everything I could yet say to
the world, something that probably no one else could or would. Not
because I'm so important a person, but simply because my ideas are
unique. Everybody has unique ideas, and this is one reason for our
individual existence.
In this book I try to accomplish what I was unable to accomplish in
my whole life until now. I'm offering ideas in the hope that someone
may find them interesting and worth realizing. If no one does, either my
ideas are not so good (but I'm going to write them anyway, as a senior
citizen what else could I do?), or the world just does not want to know.
Okay, what's the big deal? A lot of elderly people write a book to
do one more useful thing, they write family histories, personal
memoirs, an erotic novel they always wanted to read but no one had
written. How is my book different?
Well, I realized that in all my life I was good at having ideas but
never good at carrying them out. So if I pick a topic and try to
write a book on it, chances are that I will never finish it. Or if I
do, it's going to be one book, and that's it. There goes my only
chance. So I've decided not to try to write these many possible books
but write only one -- about, and instead of, all those possible
books that I could write. And let the readers pick up those ideas,
let them write my many books. This book about books may be my last
chance to prove my life, to prove that my life was useful, this is
my chance to MAKE myself useful.
Time goes, time flies, time is always on the premium. So I'm not
waiting any furter, I start this project in this very minute. And in
order to make its content available as soon as possible, I upload the
pages to my website, with keywords for the search engines to pick up
and catalog -- at the time of writing Google seems to be the number-one
search engine. So, Google and me. Get going.