Literary Lineage

"We like to know the lineage of ideas" --"On the Writing of Essays" Alexander Smith

My friend states that her literary parents are Viriginia Woolf and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Montaigne might be her grandfather. I'm not exactly sure where he fits in. As far as training goes, I am from the line of Seneca (lost his stoicism: alas) and from Senenca to Montaigne (As from Adam we skip to Abraham) and from Montaigne to Philip Lopate (a much larger leap into modernity) who fathered David Lazar, who raised Patrick Madden, who adopted me. I am a conglomeration of tradition, upheld by poetry, tutored by fiction, guarded by theory, entitled (however much) by the essay. In reality, I am the hybrid genre, the human soul, the release. I realized last week that my "project" is one of combination. I cannot choose between genres because I love them too much, yet because I do not wholly belong to any of them I cannot specialize. I must be my own form. (This is probably true for every creation and creator--so disjointed and yet connected).

This epiphany following a conversation that ranged from Zizek to Carl Dennis to categories of literary shape to constructs of faith. If we learn the rules in order to best break them, do we also honor tradition so that we can best re-form them?