Are there other world's than this?

"Now he could, and too often did, scan through the thousand pictures, a record of his life, in minutes. All he had to do was keep his finger on the leftward arrow. It was too easy. It was not good. It kept him in a dangerous stasis of nostalgia and regret and horror."*


             I've been in and out of the world lately. Two jobs and I went back to school and a stack of books that I'll never let get any smaller. I think more than any of my obligations or responsibilities the Dark Tower books have distracted me the most. I like Roland. He's my kind of guy. He describes himself in the first book as being, "the last of that green and warm-hued world" which has long since moved on. Yet he's still out there searching...hunting down his ghosts and (I haven't gotten to the end yet) the Dark Tower. Stephen King admits to modeling Roland's character off Clint Eastwood from The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and you get that wide-screen, dusty western feel from the books. The lonesome hero. The search. We all know the story, but The Dark Tower adds an element of nostalgia and also magic that those westerns  were missing. Roland talks about destiny and I listen, although I have no idea what mine is, or even if I believe in it. There's also the sense of decay in the books that I feel all around me, the sense of winding-down, that the world's moved on and moving away. 
              Dave Eggers just came out with a new book, A Hologram for the King, which struck me as uncannily similar in the sense that it is also about a world that moved on, and left a protagonist wandering around a different desert (in Saudi Arabia). The New York Times book review described it as kind of a "Death of an American Salesman" and it left me feeling like there isn't much to look forward to, as a country, because we've been totally sold out. Not just sold out by the government, but by each other, capitalism, a big bold ETC. We're just at the end now. A winding down. Watched in conjunction with the new HBO series Newsroom, you get the feeling that other people are picking up on it too. The lack of American imagination has become the lack of progress, which makes us a wasteland not just for artists but for everyone. In A Hologram for the King the main character describes watching the last NASA launch, it's heartbreaking, and its terribly similar to what Aaron Sorkin writes about America on Newsroom (bottom line, we're getting played, hard, by a lot of different people). 


                I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the national crisis of imagination or tolerance, passing moments of panic maybe, but instead spend my time reading and getting lost in fantasy novels where the great times have past, the heroes are already gone. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, the Dark Tower Series- all worlds where the heroes are long dead and the battles are over, until the next story starts anyway (and who among us doesn't secretly wish for their chance to be a hero, for Aragorn or Roland to ride up on their horse and say, time to fight? It's my favorite daydream) I only thought it was interesting, and worth writing down, that this similar feeling that "the world's moved on, and I with it" (courtesy of Roland) is seeping into other stories and coming from other writers. 
                 
                I've got looks of other books to write about. And soon.


*Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King