Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? An oft asked question, and a deceptive one; it seems to require a yes/no answer, as if only one of the options offered can be true. Both are true, of course, just as the seemingly contradictory proverbs and aphorisms offered by our elders as cliched forms of life advice were actually joined together as part of a broader truth.
Even the simplest moment in our story can be the focal point for all sorts of threads, long and short, from earlier panels of the tapestry of life. What do the activities, for example, of Louis Pasteur, Howard Florey, Tim Berners-Lee, Walter Weedon, the vagaries of DNA replication, Johannes Gutenberg, and an anonymous person who passed through the same air-space as me a couple of weeks or so ago, have to do with this blog post?
Florey, of course, is the person credited with the first trials of penicillin - without which so many people now living would be absent from the world. Without Pasteur, though, would Florey have known what he was trying to fight?
Berners-Lee proposed the information management system that became the World Wide Web - an invention that could be held up as an analogy for almost all human creativity; like most things we do, it has released into the world the best and the worst of all that the human mind contains.
Walter Weedon was one of my great-grandfathers, and the family stories say that his choice of second wife had a significant influence on the life choices of his two daughters by his first wife - one of those daughters being my father's mother. Both left home early after conflict with their step-mother, no doubt making different life choices than would have been the case if home had been more comfortable for them.
The Great Depression was in full swing by then, too, and would also have affected their options. The choices made by one of them (my grandmother) set a course that helped me end up here in the beautiful Blue Mountains. When I walk to the village today, I am walking the same streets and tracks they did, alongside the same stream they once waded in while their dairy cows grazed nearby.
As for that anonymous person, well, I can't name you, even though I probably saw you, but you had been giving shelter to a mutated bacteria that was also setting out to seek a new home in the wider world - and it found my trachea. Its surface coatings were different to those of its ancestors, due to the inevitable coding errors that creep into genotypes during mitosis, and thus unrecognisable to my immune system.
No doubt, as it made itself comfortable in its new home, more transcription errors occurred, and many of its progeny were lost in the battle that ensued - but, for a while there, breathing was not an easy process. Thanks indeed to Florey and all the others whose efforts allow me to be once again sitting at my screen and keyboard, enjoying all the benefits that flowed from Sir Timothy Berners-Lee's genius.
Gutenberg was the man who put together so many disparate threads of human endeavour to come up with - almost 600 years ago - the processes that gave us, long before the World Wide Web, the ability to cheaply and almost indiscriminately spread our thoughts around the globe, so that they could be read long after the author had moved on to other activities, or even left the planet altogether.
What a boon his printing press has been to me as I was propped up in my chair, enjoying the benefits of Florey's work. I actually managed to make a small dent in my "To be Read" list, during which, I enjoyed The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, by Stuart Kells. Make some time for this one, it is worth a few quiet hours in a comfortable corner.
So many threads woven into my story that I can only partly know - so many more I may never know about; but what a pleasure it is go go searching.
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