II. THE WALTER EGO
A man gets into a car. Driving along at 27km an hour, he imagines himself on the Meditteranean island he recently bought on the royalties from his debut novel, a thriller which was the highest-selling fiction book in the world last year. Now working on the follow-up, he finds that the best ideas come from these gentle spins round his private island. He presses his foot on the accelerator – gotta cut this spin short, Dan Brown is dropping in on the chopper in five minutes.
Damn. That was the turn off for Donaghmede library. They close in five minutes. And they won’t renew the book over the phone because it’s already been renewed ten times. The wife will kill me if I get another bloody fine.
DEFINITION: The Walter Ego is the tendency to resort to fantasy as a way of escaping one’s unsatisfyingly ordinary life. It is named in honour of Walter Mitty, the anti-hero of James Thurber’s classic 1941 short story, The Adventures of Walter Mitty. (It was later made into a wonderful film starring Danny Kaye.) In the story, Mitty futilely tries to escape his humdrum and henpecked existence by spending his time daydreaming of one grandiose adventure after another.
DISAPPOINTER MODE: escapism, magical thinking, unrealistic goals.
MOTTO: ‘All I gotta do is dream, dream, dream, dream.’
APPOINTER MODE: imaginative restlessness, thinking big, sense of possibility.
