Limits at Mortality (or something of the like)

o, systems analysis
the idea came to me in a dream, one of those early morning, half-lucid sequences. i was thinking about what topic to focus on for my impending essay, and woke up with "people have to create limits, people cannot escape limits," in my head.
the two collections i am analyzing are Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth and Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. i am to discern a similarity of theme or vision between the two, and dissect this on the tablet of text-based analysis. choosing to remain faithful to my dream (and really, i had little time to explore other ideas), i have undertaken the task of exploring constructs--psychological, social, historical, even geographical--in creating direction, purpose, character (as in individuality), and even happiness. (Did i just figure out my thesis?)
anyway, the preliminary idea is that infinity, the icon of unboundedness, is only useful as just that: an icon. In reality, absolute freedom is impossible to navigate--there are no footholds, no friction, and therefore, none of that progress that marks the passage/living of life. Even in math, the concept of infinity remains locked in theory until limits are applied to it. Like Prof. Moss said in the introductory session of English 240, tethers are necessary to movement, to substance and achievement. Likewise, the famous physicist Albert Einstein also remarked, "Only when we know our limits can we go beyond them." Because, also, in reality, there is no such thing as absolute freedom (or maybe even freedom, but that's tangled up in another discussion), only the illusion of it. Perhaps this illusion is broadened by structure, the lenses through which one chooses to view life and the rest of the world.
and, to extend, as i mentioned in my enclosures post, limiting structures provide protection in the most primitive sense; it's just that humans take the idea of skeletons and armors to the psychological (I suppose animals have this too--social structure, at least, rituals through which life is perpetuated and indeed, achieved).
again, i'm having megatons of trouble focusing on specific stories to analyze. it's actually much easier after you've decided which stories to focus on, because much of the time, you can find the same underlying message throughout all of these stories, just in different designs; and maybe the most helpful thing to figure out is which of these designs is most accessible to you and your idea:
Friend - geographical, historical, social (gender, class) boundaries, religious to a lesser extent
Urges - religious and social (here, it is particularly evident that religious bleeds into, colors the social)
: how within boundaries, we make our homes
: how boundaries provide direction--footholds, a rope to clasp to in times of darkness by offering a lense/blinders and by preserving the potential of promise (Flora and her stringent religion; Almeda making sense of the world through the limits of the written word--a contortionistic wringing of meaning from the sometimes cruelties of a mundane life; the two women chasing after Mr. Brown find a purpose in the chase--a reason to primp, to stay pretty)
: how boundaries allow for progress/achievement--locomotion
: how boundaries offer protection--against insanity (Almeda--poetically, geographically: separated from Pearl St, the Jew) by giving us a processor
: when/why boundaries break down - no hope for the pious; Pictures of the Ice, For the Relief, Gilgul--does this mean that becoming too attached to a system, stripping it of its chance to evolve is unnatural? leads to consequences too dire for the fragile human psyche to handle?

finally, how we may find happiness through a unlikely thing: not through our freedoms, but through our limitations because through them, we preserve the dream of freedom, the promise of eternity (ultimately, it is our time--which in theory is infinite--that is bounded by mortality)

so while talking about constructs, i also have to consider the similarities and difference between characters (an inherent thing in this analysis, I suppose), as well as the author's vision, and the universality of specificity--this actually related to limits--by limiting, the more the author focuses on one particular character/conflict, the more the condition of all characters and conflicts are illuminated. this is like what i said before the first colon, that there is a principle that underlies all conflicts, yet they appear in infinitely varying permutations across people, place, and time: there is that universal zone between the boundaries that mark each situation as distinct.

and before i go any further, i must note that i have mentioned the albert einstein quote at least three times in three separate posts in this blog. i feel that in fact, all of my analyses, most on different topics, lead to the same big conclusion; or rather, i am pursuing all of these analyses in hope of finding out some thing, that underlying principle; a forward method, versus a backwards one, always screening for that one characteristic instead of taking each specimen at its own value. There's merit to my preferred method, but advantages to take from the second, should I be daring enough to jump trains while one is running faster than the other....