An absolutely amazing article, Liza! I was absolutely blown away by this piece! Indeed, writers and other artists are the only ones who can really truly achieve immortality. They fear death because they have a passion and a lust for life and everything beautiful in it. This is why they have this fascination with the last days of one's li…
An absolutely amazing article, Liza! I was absolutely blown away by this piece! Indeed, writers and other artists are the only ones who can really truly achieve immortality. They fear death because they have a passion and a lust for life and everything beautiful in it. This is why they have this fascination with the last days of one's life and the afterlife. I can think of so many examples of this I've observed in real life. A Christmas Carol explores this a little bit when the Ghost of Christmas Future shows Scrouge what the future will look like if he continues with his mean, miserly and selfish behavior. He sees the grave of Bob Cratchit's sickly son Tiny Tim and then is show his own. The men digging his grave comment on how his grave is quite lonely as no one came to his funeral. The ghost then sends him to his fiery end in the pits of h**l before he wakes up and realizes he's been given a second chance. Edgar Allan Poe touches on it many times in The Masque of Red Death, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Murders of the Rue Morgue, and The Oblong Box. Frankenstein and Dracula definitely touch on it as well. The former discusses why man shouldn't play God and the perils that come from bringing a person back from the dead. Let's just say it doesn’t go so well. Dracula is of course about the immortal Count Dracula who sleeps in a coffin during the day and then at night emerges to drink the blood of his helpless victims so he can continue to stay young and live forever. He has an army of basically zombies who are neither alive nor dead and will roam the Earth forever as his undead servants doing his bidding. Returning to Edgar Allan Poe (who else?), The Tell-Tale Heart follows an insane murderer who goes around butchering innocent people. He is haunted day and night, by the spirits of his victims. Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle lives everyday fearing something terrible is going to happen to him. Zora Neale Hurston's Sweat where a husband is killed by a snake, he taunts his wife with. The story that follows is all about an abused widow coping with the death of her abusive husband. Lastly, I would use the example of Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro about a man on vacation trying to change careers. But he gets injured, fails to treat his wound and slowly wastes away from gangrene. At the end of the day, the ultimate desire of man is to live forever, transcend death and be remembered for all times. This is for example why those who helped build the pyramids did all that back breaking labor or why the cast of The Wizard of Oz were honored to work on the film and kept going even though they worked under horrific conditions,
and all suffered some sort of physical or mental damage.
An absolutely amazing article, Liza! I was absolutely blown away by this piece! Indeed, writers and other artists are the only ones who can really truly achieve immortality. They fear death because they have a passion and a lust for life and everything beautiful in it. This is why they have this fascination with the last days of one's life and the afterlife. I can think of so many examples of this I've observed in real life. A Christmas Carol explores this a little bit when the Ghost of Christmas Future shows Scrouge what the future will look like if he continues with his mean, miserly and selfish behavior. He sees the grave of Bob Cratchit's sickly son Tiny Tim and then is show his own. The men digging his grave comment on how his grave is quite lonely as no one came to his funeral. The ghost then sends him to his fiery end in the pits of h**l before he wakes up and realizes he's been given a second chance. Edgar Allan Poe touches on it many times in The Masque of Red Death, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Murders of the Rue Morgue, and The Oblong Box. Frankenstein and Dracula definitely touch on it as well. The former discusses why man shouldn't play God and the perils that come from bringing a person back from the dead. Let's just say it doesn’t go so well. Dracula is of course about the immortal Count Dracula who sleeps in a coffin during the day and then at night emerges to drink the blood of his helpless victims so he can continue to stay young and live forever. He has an army of basically zombies who are neither alive nor dead and will roam the Earth forever as his undead servants doing his bidding. Returning to Edgar Allan Poe (who else?), The Tell-Tale Heart follows an insane murderer who goes around butchering innocent people. He is haunted day and night, by the spirits of his victims. Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle lives everyday fearing something terrible is going to happen to him. Zora Neale Hurston's Sweat where a husband is killed by a snake, he taunts his wife with. The story that follows is all about an abused widow coping with the death of her abusive husband. Lastly, I would use the example of Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro about a man on vacation trying to change careers. But he gets injured, fails to treat his wound and slowly wastes away from gangrene. At the end of the day, the ultimate desire of man is to live forever, transcend death and be remembered for all times. This is for example why those who helped build the pyramids did all that back breaking labor or why the cast of The Wizard of Oz were honored to work on the film and kept going even though they worked under horrific conditions,
and all suffered some sort of physical or mental damage.