Immortality

The gods envy us... because we are mortal.

To us, everything is all the more beautiful... because we are doomed.


I love Greek mythology. that reason alone stands as justification to watch Troy. With men waging bloody wars for seemingly reconcilable reasons, you would think that more than hundred centuries later, men would have learnt from their mistakes and one day realise the futility of war. Yet here we are in the birth of the 21st century and the same thing, only now fought with different weapons, seemingly happens right before our eyes again... it doesn't take a soldier subjected to having his head slowly sliced from one side to another in front of a camera, or fake photos of troops urinating on a prisoner, to reveal the different guises of the brutalities of war.

And yet, there is that beauty in that spectacle of war, re-used and re-cycled in the history of cinema. and that recurrent guilty pleasure of indulging in that spectacle, made to invoke simultaneously the sublime sense of waste and its accompanying majesty. i believe there can never be a singular absolute emotion to any one thing.

Did the heroes of that epoch really think their names would live on forever. are they part of true stories turned myth turned legend, or are they figments of imaginations passed on through time? Did they really think that 3000 years later, what they did in the present of their time, would still be remembered in our age now? Was that their only and true motivation for doing what they did? There are many questions, but never any answers, as always.

What does it take, for stories to transcend time and live solely in existence in the annals of history, or legend? How much does it take to be remembered and does it even matter...that we are remembered? Even if you were, would you even know it?

I wish I knew. I wish I could live then. wear their clothes, tread their soil, explore their cities, tap their souls. I wish time had many dimensions and we wouldn't always be stuck in the one we were assigned to all the time. I imagine the universe being zillions of story capsules, each unfolding simulaneously. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we woke up one day in the story of another... how much one could see, how much one could learn. sadly, my wishes are but a result of momentary postulation. i could never wake up one day in the story of troy. or learn how it was like, just for a day, what it was like to be Achilles. That's where, i guess, cinema takes its place. For it makes that experience possible, in the dark recesses of our mind, while we are sitting in our little cinema chair staring at a screen in front of us.