Our Feeble Humanity According to History.

Gilgamesh spent the last chapters of the epic fearing an end and pleading for eternity. In his search for immortality, he sought out Utnapishtim, the only man the gods have ever granted eternal life. However, Utnapishtam answered Gilgamesh with an ultimatum: “there is no permanence” (106).

Humans aren’t meant to live forever. We are all meant to meet our end someday no matter who we are; “what is there between the master and the servant when both have met their doom?” (107). Everything we have learnt, as a race, from science to history shows us that there is a cycle of growth and decay. A typical example is evolution; how many of such cycles do you believe our primitive ancestors have gone through to place human beings as the dominant animals? I can confidently say that even the human race, with all its glory, may one day bend over for a new dominant race just as the Neanderthals did for Homo sapiens.

Nothing is meant to last forever. If I learned one thing from my ninth grade World History class, it was just this. We started the year off with the clever Greeks. They saw some success in the fields of art, sciences and even war. Then they were conquered; that ended the era of Greece. Then we fast forwarded to the height of the Roman Empire. They were successful as well especially in the incorporation of Greek literature and Art. Alas they weren’t to last either. Europe fell to the rule of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. If we were to fast forward a little more, we will land in the wake of the Great British Empire. Where are they now? (It’s interesting how much a World History class focused on just one part of the whole).

If our great civilizations, the greatest inventions of humanity, can’t last an eternity then what can? Nothing… Even so, there is a way to still pass on a legacy.

Here is where my favorite quote takes part and it is ironically taken from Nickleback: “Each day’s a gift and not a given right”. Gilgamesh’s epic mirrors this quote a little bit as well when Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that “Life and death do [the gods] allot but the day of death they do not disclose” (107). We human beings will never know the day of our death and that gets us thinking: “what if it’s tomorrow? What if that’s the day the god’s have set aside for our deaths?”

 Oh and if there is one thing I have learned from the Final Destination series it’s that death can be really persistent; No one can cheat death.

Therefore humans found a way to give meaning to life. One way is through friendship, love and family. The closeness of a bond can give us joy, melt away our loneliness and give us a reason to kick ourselves awake in the morning. If one person has given time to keep another man company then that man has reason to live and return the favor. No one wants to be lonely.

Religion, that has been passed down through the ages and permeated through the population of the Earth, is another way to explain live and give reason to it. For instance, according to my Catholic faith, one has to live and perform good deeds so our hearts are lighter than a feather; that way, we can pass God’s ultimate test and enter Heaven’s gates.

Finally there are our children, our legacy in genes. They are the ones who carry our names into the world (mostly our surnames). When we think about in terms of “legacy” then we realize that we can finally understand helicopter moms. I mean if we really want our children to represent us then shouldn’t we put our best foot forward?

Now back to religion; we humans are always looking for more than just a meaning in life. We are all looking to give our lives eternal meanings. In order to end this exhausting search in the dark, humans have created religion. We bury our dead; why is that? Isn’t it because to respect them by “immortalizing” their memory? We create meaning in our current lives to secure an eternity in heaven. It’s heaven in Catholicism, but it’s different in other religions. However, isn’t it fascinating that all major religions mention a life after death?

Think about the Greeks: they had the great kingdom of Hades. Think about the Egyptians: they built pyramids as gateways to the afterlife. Think about the Hindus: they believe in reincarnation.

We all aim to be famous in science, business, politics or art. It’s just one way we wish to maintain a legacy, a story just about us. After all we all know how feeble life can be. After all, according to the bible and now Utnapishtim, we have been killed off before by a giant flood and there’s no reason why it couldn’t happen again.

Heroism is Universal

Here’s an interesting story:

My English teacher sophomore year believed in the power of creative writing. so I, as a student in her honors English II class, was “encouraged” to come up with a different short story every month. At the end of the year, they were collected and compared. She tried to show us just how much we improved over the year; or, in my case, how lazy we got over the year.

The interesting part of this story, however, is the similarity between the creative abilities of the students in the class. Despite the diversity in ethnicity and gender, every student in the class came up with a similar plotline as the basics. A poor pitiful character, with a problem, embarks on a journey with several obstacles along the way. At the end of the tale, the character’s grief is elevated and he returns home.

One has to understand that the main character usually varies from a toothbrush to a king of a mystical kingdom, but in context they were all “heroes”.

A “hero”, in any culture around the world, is defined as one who is admired for his courage and accomplishes something great, a deed which is then called a “heroic deed”. Or, in a more literary sense, a character who takes a journey, willingly or unwillingly, in the unknown and returns changed; in the process, he changes his world or the world.

Based on this definition, the protagonists from Odyssey, Hercules and Beowulf are all similar. Their stories are reflected in modern day as well, although in more style. For instance, there is Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. The popularity of the movies based on DC comics and Marvel and the soon return of Nnja Turtles and Teen Titans reflects our ever growing interest in heroes.

As a human race, we define heroic acts as something generalized like “saving the world” but that may not be just it. Heroic acts can vary from rescuing a cat from a tree to saving the galaxies from erupting into an intergalactic war. The basics are that the acts have to reflect courage; the heroes must go against the odds and they have to accomplish something that’s not only “great” but universally “good”.

Did you notice that in all my definitions of heroes, I never once used the pronoun “she”. That’s because in the usual definition of hero, a man is most likely to be depicted.  King Arthur, Merlin, Hercules and Luke Skywalker were all men. However, those are the “classics”. In the more modern novels, women have stood up as “heroines”. Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, walked the yellow brick road and made a hazardous journey to the Emerald city. Alice from Alice in Wonderland slew the Red Queen. The protagonists from both Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre changed their worlds into what is generally expected positive.

Heroine driven literature is rising to the point where I feel the library shelves are overfilling: Mortal Instruments, Haven, Daughter of the Flame, Graceling, etc.

Bertol Brecht once said “Unhappy the land that needs heroes” and I believe that means that everyone should be a hero not need one. The motif of a hero is the motif of a character that ventures into the unknown, their unconscious, and unlocks its secret. In other words, they reach their full potential as human beings and become changed men and in turn change the world around them.

As the human race, we do not need heroes. Their only role in society is to show us what we can achieve individually.