The Urge to Create
Oct. 9th, 2017 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribAs you may have heard here, I recently visited The Old Soil, AKA Lithuania. It's a cute country in Eastern Europe with a bad history of getting absorbed by Russia. It's also a small country, with around 2.8 million people, roughly the same population as Kansas.
Lithuania never built any overseas empires, so other than those 2.8 million Lithuanians, there aren't very many people who speak Lithuanian. If you want to get ahead in Lithuania, you learn English, something that's helped by the fact that there's an FM radio station in Kaunas that plays American Top 40 music. (My cab driver was listening to it.)
But people have a strong urge to create. So strong that the Lithuanian folk restaurant I ate at was able to create a several-hour-long mix tape of songs in Lithuanian, including rock-and-roll. The people who recorded those songs couldn't have made a lot of money off of the recordings, but the urge to create was strong enough that they did it anyway.
Lithuania never built any overseas empires, so other than those 2.8 million Lithuanians, there aren't very many people who speak Lithuanian. If you want to get ahead in Lithuania, you learn English, something that's helped by the fact that there's an FM radio station in Kaunas that plays American Top 40 music. (My cab driver was listening to it.)
But people have a strong urge to create. So strong that the Lithuanian folk restaurant I ate at was able to create a several-hour-long mix tape of songs in Lithuanian, including rock-and-roll. The people who recorded those songs couldn't have made a lot of money off of the recordings, but the urge to create was strong enough that they did it anyway.
