Being a Seagull

Another Iain M. Banks quote - this one from “Use Of Weapons”. Herein, Zakalwe, a virtuoso career mercenary who has changed the course of civilizations with assassinations, kidnappings, and sabotages, muses on what it might be like to live a simpler life.

He envied people who could be born, be raised, mature with those around them, have friends, and then settle down in one place with one set of acquaintances, live ordinary and unspectacular, unrisky lives and grow old and be replaced, their children coming to see them...and die old and senile, content with all that had gone before.

He could never have believed he would ever feel like this, that he would so ache to be like that, to have despairs just so deep, joys just so great; to never strain the fabric of life or fater, but to be minor, unimportant, uninfluential.

It seemed utterly sweet, infinitely desirable, now and forever, because once in that situation, once you were there...would you ever feel the awful need to do as he had done, and try for those heights? He doubted it[...]

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird...but how could _you_ be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you.

If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.

I find it comforting, when life is full of trials that I have brought on myself by striving, to remember that I could not not have those desires and still remain myself. It was not a bad choice that led to my hardship; I made the only choices that I could have made. Since I am who I am, and I love and value myself (a lifelong project, that one - but one I’m doing well at!), I should not resent the difficulties that go along with being that person.

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