Oh to live forever...
Immortality, it's a subject that I've been rather obsessed with pondering over for the past few weeks. I've written quite a few short stories and other things that involve it, none that I want to post here because of their relatively rough shape right now, but I'm going to sit here and muse regardlessly.
It's all over our literature and oral tradition, right back to the cave drawings of ancient nomads. All have been obsessed with living forever...or at least producing something that lives on forever.
But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd,
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives and dies in single blessedness.
-Theseus, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Whether it be to produce children, as displayed in the quote above, or to write or paint or to simply do something that will make someone; it doesn't matter who; think about you after your death, so that, in them, you live on. It's been an obsession. Immortality, Eternal Life, it's offered in all religion, it's something that everyone from king to vagabond has searched and killed and plundered and died for.
The Continental U.S. was first explored by Europeans looking not to expand, to fulfil Manifest Destiny...but to live forever, to find an elusive fountain that will make a man young again, to take on "all manly exercises… take a new wife and beget more children" (Herrera). Ponce de Leon himself died in battle looking for it, a stones throw from the place he was considering to be the spring of the all healing water.
Humans have always, and will always, search for it until they kill themselves in the process. It scares the living hell out of each and every one of us; the fact that we will all grow old, that we will all eventually die. It is the end to every story, inevitable death, ceasing to exist. Everyone must accept this, writers moreover, for they all have to come to terms with, invariably, that no matter what they are writing, if it goes on long enough, will end in death, just like their own novel, their own autobiography. It ends in death.
And everyone of us dreams of avoiding that. It is the driving point beyond so many books, so many paintings. It is the focus, it seems, of our existence, this unquentiable thirst, it is like the bloodlust of a vampire, a myth itself derived from this exact craving. No matter how many times they wind up in our nightmares, we keep going back to their stories because they offer that thing, that thing that all of us die seeking.
Immortality.
We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.
-Harriet Martineau
It's all over our literature and oral tradition, right back to the cave drawings of ancient nomads. All have been obsessed with living forever...or at least producing something that lives on forever.
But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd,
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives and dies in single blessedness.
-Theseus, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Whether it be to produce children, as displayed in the quote above, or to write or paint or to simply do something that will make someone; it doesn't matter who; think about you after your death, so that, in them, you live on. It's been an obsession. Immortality, Eternal Life, it's offered in all religion, it's something that everyone from king to vagabond has searched and killed and plundered and died for.
The Continental U.S. was first explored by Europeans looking not to expand, to fulfil Manifest Destiny...but to live forever, to find an elusive fountain that will make a man young again, to take on "all manly exercises… take a new wife and beget more children" (Herrera). Ponce de Leon himself died in battle looking for it, a stones throw from the place he was considering to be the spring of the all healing water.
Humans have always, and will always, search for it until they kill themselves in the process. It scares the living hell out of each and every one of us; the fact that we will all grow old, that we will all eventually die. It is the end to every story, inevitable death, ceasing to exist. Everyone must accept this, writers moreover, for they all have to come to terms with, invariably, that no matter what they are writing, if it goes on long enough, will end in death, just like their own novel, their own autobiography. It ends in death.
And everyone of us dreams of avoiding that. It is the driving point beyond so many books, so many paintings. It is the focus, it seems, of our existence, this unquentiable thirst, it is like the bloodlust of a vampire, a myth itself derived from this exact craving. No matter how many times they wind up in our nightmares, we keep going back to their stories because they offer that thing, that thing that all of us die seeking.
Immortality.
We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.
-Harriet Martineau