2003-04-24 - 10:39 p.m.
How long do lives continue existing through memory? When one passes on, all that is carried away is the soul. No money, no family, no love, no hate, no passion, and no dispair is carried away with the soul. How does one become immortal? As far as we know, it is by the preservation of the memory of a person that he or she is immortalized. The living immortalize the deceased by continuing to remember them. But how many generations and how many people can carry that on? Is it the value of one's lifetime of work that sets this precedent? If so, how is it that many of the contributors of the many things that we know today are not with us daily, and yet people who have not contributed nearly as much continue to live on in the memory of many, perhaps to infamy? Who chooses whose memory shall live on? On what basis? When does that immortality finally die away? When do people finally stop remembering?
During every lifetime, it can be said that each soul is decorated by the path that it takes. Somewhat fate and somewhat choice, each turn in the path shapes and reshapes the soul. The starving man in the refugee camp meets his future wife, and a notch is carved. In the confines of her cardboard shelter the Romani youth gives birth to her first baby boy, and her soul is carefully etched. In her war-torn village, the grandmother of nine is brutally beaten and raped, and her soul is dealt another hammer blow, one of many in her lifetime. In an infamous prison, the guard finally executes the man he has tortured for the past ten years, and his soul is stained with the lacquer of death. Among the ruins of the charred bodies in the battlefield, a soldier gives the final absolution to a dying comrade, and his soul shines ever bright. The last human on Earth stands on the remains of her desolate planet, praying for forgiveness for her species' acts which brought her there. When no one answers, she forgets herself and everyone of her kind who came before her. She remembers the mortality of herself and everyone preceding her. Every soul that had ever been committed to memory, at that instant, is smote the final blow, and is shattered to pieces. And the sculptor of souls begins anew.
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"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."
Descartes
"Stop thinking, and end your problems."
Lao Tzu
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