I've been playing around with the concept of originality lately, both in my courses and in my everyday life, and I've come to the conclusion that this idea which we pride ourselves so heavily on actually does not exist.
One definition of the word "original" is "something serving as a model or basis for imitations or copies." I find this comical because, well, if you think about it, everything is based on something else. Our own thoughts lack originality because they are influenced by preexisting ideas that we cannot choose to mentally ignore. It is inevitable, my friends.
As a child, I amused myself by attempting to think of nothing. I'm sure many of us have experienced a moment in our lives where we stop and realize for a moment that, at any given time, the human brain is active, and thoughts are flowing within it and through it. Upon realizing this, I decided that I would empty my mind. "How?" you might ask. Well, it's simple: I thought of nothing. But here's the thing. By thinking of nothing, I was thinking of something, and that something was nothing. We cannot clear our minds even if we want to do so, which brings me to my next point.
With thoughts constantly flowing without any sign of stopping, we must realize that in observing everyday life, texts, nature, what have you, we are starting off with a mind chock-full of thoughts. These thoughts, as we know, are the products of older thoughts. Our older thoughts come from what we see, hear, feel, touch, and smell. Therefore, everything we come to realize is not original, but rather the product of a preexisting idea.
Our fashion sense, our behaviors and our conversations are all products of our past experiences. It is as simple as a function: we take in ideas only to output new ones. But how can we consider these ideas to be new if it took an input to bring about their existence? Voltaire once said, "Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another." Writers are essentially trapped within the confines of intertextuality, where their piece is related to older texts.
How should we feel knowing that everything we say and everything we do can never truly be original? I suppose we cannot get too worked up about it, because it is not only inevitable, but also unsolvable. I think we would much prefer to live in a world where everything we know is connected through an evolutionary-esque web. After all, if we didn't live this way, we would be subject to constant originality, and by default, we wouldn't connect, relate, or even sympathize with each other. Simply stated: If originality existed, then the interconnected human race wouldn't.
