Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Quests and Quotes

Everyone has a different quest.

For me, quest means searching for meaning, or oneself, or something of importance, with or without being conscious of it. I think most of what I can call quest is done unawares.

Some people are luckier than me, as they are very sure of their quest. For example: Hilary Clinton's quest is amusing herself by using her hair. No, I am not making it up. She said so herself: "I'm undaunted in my quest to amuse myself by constantly changing my hair." Remember she did this by going all over the world as the secretary of state.

Whereas Martin Luther King thought most people's quest is not-to think. I'm not putting words in his mouth, Heaven forbid. Here is the quote: "There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think." Now, here, I won't let the truth stare me in the eye. Half-baked solutions, at times, do the job without worsening my arthritis.

Then, William Shatner uses the word quest to sell his books (!): "If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you'll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked." And no, again. I'm not a Trekkie. In my defense, I only liked the original series. But I digress.

Back to what I wanted to talk about: the pattern of the Quest.

Quests require great labor and energy on the part of the heroes, because they need to overcome numerous difficult obstacles, plus they travel a lot. No matter from which angle you look at it, a quest is something different for each person. It can be the Quest for the Holy Grail or walking the El Camino Santiago or going down the Mississippi River with Huck Finn. Or it could be space travel for amateurs with money like Richard Branson, the billionaire, and Justin Bieber, little boy singer. Well, power to them!

Quest is also a plotting tool. According to Professor Thomas C. Foster: The real reason for a quest story is self-knowledge. A true quest story consists of five elements.
1. One who is or will be on a quest, with or without his knowledge
2. A place to go (or an aim to reach)
3. A stated reason to go there
4. Challenges and trials en route
5. The real reason for the journey

There you have it. An outline for most any fiction piece. Doesn't this make almost all stories quests? And all stories writers' quests?

Maybe, but some journalists' and magazine editors' quests may differ a bit, as they like to fool around with their computer screens: "The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I'm always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest." Susan Orlean (of) NewYorker

If anyone thinks writers and journalists are mixed-up people when it comes to quests, they should take a look at what programmers and makers of apps have as their quests. Don't these quotes from a blog called Programmer's Quest illustrate this situation?
"The Space Complexity of a Binary Search Tree (BST) = N + 2 N (2 pointers for each data_element)
= 3*N"
"For example, "linked list" which use 1 pointer per "data elements" will amount to the "Space Complexity" of SizeOf(data_elements) + ((Number of data_elements) * SizeOf(Pointer))."
http://progquest.blogspot.com

What, what, what?

And another thing: when they say "parent" they don't mean their mothers or fathers. Go figure!