On Fear

I found that Fear would only be appeased if I gave up everything I aspired to. So I gave Fear. I gave up giving any thought to my fears, and moved ahead without any regard to them. Some people find fear a stimulant; it is in some cases. But I find it mostly a paralysing influence. I think, at least as far as my case is concerned, the greatest victories are won when fear is conquered, not kept alive in the hope that it will serve as a stimulant.

Dorian Gray

The movie Dorian Gray was released this year with Ben Barnes playing the protagonist, and what I did eagerly was watch it. Based on the novel by Oscar Wilde published in 1890, it is a fascinating story and it never fails to captivate my heart and mind. I never tire of reading this story again and again, possibly because it deals with the issue of eternal life.

In the story Dorian Gray is ready to give up his soul for eternal youth. In the days when I was a young boy and was afraid of God, the story would have certainly frightened me. Not only would I have been afraid of selling my soul--giving up one's morality makes sense, as the absurd concept of exchanging a soul, which other than something related somehow to one's personality and sense of morality is not some entity proven to exist(physical or otherwise)--but I would have been afraid to ask for the virtue of immortality.

Even in the age of science, I feel a little hesitant about asking for immortality, for there is still a chance that getting immortality could have a curse attached to it. Something could go wrong: the scientists mayn't have done enough tests and there could be some horrible side effects.

That is the reason I enjoy reading this book many times. Think about Gray. He is handsome, and rich: he has all that any man needs to enjoy a good life. But the fact remains that all this enjoyment is temporary. Dorian has all every man wants, but he hasn't the one thing that no man has ever gotten--immortality. Without immortality, all time is borrowed time; time is the master with you as its slave.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the story of a man ready to submit to the Devil to get his immortal life. But that isn't what the story's charm really is all about. The Christian mythology and the sins of Gray are common among men and ultimately uninteresting. The one thing of interest to us in this new century is the contest we have with nature for the secret of immortality. We learn the secrets of nature and devise ways to use nature's power to suit our ends. If we do are jobs right and have manage to assess the risks appropriately, we get what we wish; otherwise, we suffer for our mistakes and end up living with some odd scheme of affairs the rest of our lives the way Dorian's picture aged in lieu of him. This is one story I am sure will possess the power to captivate even in that future where immortality is a commonplace reality. Eternal life--the one great void that needs to be filled in this desert of life.

Humans Explained?

On The Beach, Lost Horizon, and Lord of the Flies

Much time had passed before sheer boredom and a lack of interest in any of the new releases of December 2009 compelled me to recall some memorable old movies that seemed worth watching again. I tried to watch the Hunt for Red October, but I had watched it many times before. So though I enjoyed the scenes of Red October, I found that I remembered them too well to be motivated to endure 134 minutes of it. I finally tried The beach, a movie I had watched several times before just as I had read Lost Horizon so many times before.

There are several issues the movie touches on: 1) the disappointment of modern explorers who wish there were more regions to explore in the world, but who must accept the fact that there are few truly unknown places left on Earth—the age of exploration is over and every square inch of the planet is observable using satellites; 2) humanity’s ever growing population, referred to unkindly though not inaccurately as parasites, albeit only the tourists are focused on by Richard who are overcrowding tourist spots and creating the drabness and cheapness of cities just by their sheer numbers in the very place one wishes not to experience the madness of the city; 3) and finally the topic is human selfishness and how the fantasy and euphoria of Paradise is watered down as the reality of human selfishness tragically dawns on both the movie’s characters and the movie’s viewers.

William Golding had made the point well in his novel Lord of the Flies which deals with the complex mixture of fear, selfishness and savagery that can be amplified and ignited in the minds of men so easily as to drive them to reject all the wisdom and humanity that civilization has to offer. Golding showed how vulnerable civilization was as can be inferred from the following statement of the officer that finally rescues the boys: "We saw your smoke. What have you been doing? Having a war or something?” In the end the boys are saved, but there is irony and fatalism mixed in the closing chapter of Lord of the Flies, even though the boys are saved the British captain is already part of a war that is costing human lives. He admonishes the boys ,telling them that being British they should have “put up a better show than that”. But it is a fact that humanity has never really managed a better show than the boys had been involved in: we have fought and killed; adopted superstition; and we generally are poor at saving the more precious stuff when the need arises. We have been lucky, it may be said. And therein lie the fatalism and irony related to humanity's existence and future. It is this point that the movie illustrates. All people have their own particular brand of darkness of their souls which doesn’t horrify them, but once observed in others it is horrifying and abhorrent.