The Gunslinger

This year I began reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, a fantasy and western epic.  King has described the series as his magnum opus or masterpiece.   It is comprised of eight novels and draws inspiration from many sources including The Lord of the Rings, Sergio Leone’s westerns, and Arthurian legend.  The first book in the series is called The Gunslinger and the tag line of the book is “The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed.”  The Gunslinger is the main character of the series his name is Roland.  Clint Eastwood’s character “the man with no name” in Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy”, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, was the main inspiration for Roland and that is how I pictured him in my head as I read the book.  Roland is a complex character and King does his best to reveal more and more of him as the story progresses.  In the beginning the only thing the reader knows about Roland is that he is chasing the Man in Black, you also know very little about why he is doing this.  The interactions he has with other characters and flashbacks he has allow the reader to learn more about his intentions.  King also reveals the world in the same way, you start of reading the book thinking that it is set in the Old West, which it is, but and more events occur you can see how different this world is to our own.  The world that King created exists almost parallel to our own, and throughout the story there are remnants of our world that appear in Roland’s.  This first story features magic, gunfights, monsters, and mysteries and it is easy to read and easy to get sucked into the rest of the books in the series.

The Ten Rules of Being Human

·      You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, “life.”

·      Lessons are repeated until they are learned.  A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it.  When you have learned it, you can go onto the next lesson.

·      Learning lessons does not end.  There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons.  If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.

·      There are no mistakes, only lessons.  Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation.  The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.”

These four are all good life tips, but I think they can be combined into one big rule.  You could get the message of all these through saying every time you do something in your life, whether it is a success or failure, it is an experience that you can use to improve yourself.  These lessons will continue all your life because there is always something more to learn.

·      “There” is no better a place than “here.”  When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”

I like this one and I think it is really applicable today.  People are always worrying about where they are going or what is happening tomorrow no one takes the time to appreciate where you are here and now.

Students seem to have a hard time with that idea of enjoying where they are right now.  Most of my junior year everyone around me was always worrying about whatever test they had next week, what they got on the SATs, or were just constantly checking their grades on Powerschool.  I’m not saying that school is not important it just seemed to engulf many people’s lives and they would constantly be worry or stressed out.  My life lesson to these people would to take a step back calm down because whatever you are worrying about it is not as dire as you are making it seem to be.

·      You will forget all this.

This seems a bit depressing but it goes along with what I had said before.  Whatever you do, however bad it may seem right now, people will forget about it, you will forget about it because in the grand scheme of things its really not that important.