Tennyson wrote that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never have loved at all. Perhaps it is the approaching spring but I realized the other night that I miss being in love. There is something terribly wonderful, something sublime about being in love.
The sweet agony that is love reminds us all of what it is to be truly alive. We are after all physical beings and that yearning for the simple touch of another sits at the centre of every truly human heart.
Love in all of its madness and glory has left scars across the human landscape for thousands of years. It is perhaps the greatest of human inventions and one that is both our redemption and our curse.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Why does it matter?
I just watched the end of another post-apocalyptic television series on an American network. Jericho.
So why is it that non-Americans like me are affected by this kind of show? Why do the emotional cues and triggers that are directly tied to the American mythos work on others?
Much of the world sees America as a failed experiment, one where its citizens fell prey to the most venal of desires - where a dream of equality and freedom mutated into a nightmare of excessive individualism and monstrous greed.
But still we are affected by shows and movies that portray the notion of redemption - where the American Empire collapses into the arms of its own rebirth. We ache for our cousins to be redeemed so that their dream can be restored to its original purity.
And it is the American Dream that still fills us with desire - with a longing for a utopia where all are free and equal and want has truly been abolished. It is the secular Eden - built by human society in its own idealized image. For who else has dreamt anything so marvellous, so ambitious, so completely human?
So why is it that non-Americans like me are affected by this kind of show? Why do the emotional cues and triggers that are directly tied to the American mythos work on others?
Much of the world sees America as a failed experiment, one where its citizens fell prey to the most venal of desires - where a dream of equality and freedom mutated into a nightmare of excessive individualism and monstrous greed.
But still we are affected by shows and movies that portray the notion of redemption - where the American Empire collapses into the arms of its own rebirth. We ache for our cousins to be redeemed so that their dream can be restored to its original purity.
And it is the American Dream that still fills us with desire - with a longing for a utopia where all are free and equal and want has truly been abolished. It is the secular Eden - built by human society in its own idealized image. For who else has dreamt anything so marvellous, so ambitious, so completely human?
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