Join us for another wonderful issue of Wattmag! This March, we're celebrating the release of Beauty and the Beast by talking about Disney and some of our favorite fairytale retellings. We also delve into the world of writing with awesome advice on w...
Immortality. We all know that word and the thousand luring ideas that come with the fantasy of living an infinite amount of years. Oh, the possibilities! I could hunt for every first edition tome of my favorite poet Kahlil Gibran.
Truth be told, unless you're an alchemist or an obscure avant-garde scientist with millions of dollars of funding, the notion of eternal life is out of reach. Let me just clear something up before I get ahead of myself here, I am not referring to an immortal afterlife (if your religious convictions affirm you there is one), I am speaking of human-terrestrial-mundane immortality.
In more than one fairytale and or modern young adult novel we are always tainted with the vanity of immortality. Typically, the way that is achieved is by either eating a mermaid, finding the holy grail, or eating some magical fruit; like the Chinese peaches of immortality, the golden apples of the Norse or drinking the ambrosia of the Greeks. In the modern folkloric world, we are rather lazy in our approach to millennial immortality, ain't nobody got time to go looking for some magical item. Just find yourself a cute looking vampire and have them bite you, and boom, there you have it you will fulfill your dream of being sickly pale for the rest of eternity.
Hey, back off Twilight that was a good book!
I know that was silly, and maybe you're annoyed by it because the thought of death is terrifying and you really want to be immortal.
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So how do we do that in the real world? Ehm.. its sounds impossible, and the feeble-minded will convince you that it is. Technically they are right, per science nothing is immortal. In five billion years, our sun will burst in a magnificent firework show no one will ever witness. What is more depressing is the fact that we only have another 2.8 billion years of possible earthly life before we are burnt out of existence by our king star.
Sorry, don't mean to scare you I promise. On the bright side, there is still a long time until that happens, and hopefully humanity, if it has not destroyed itself yet, will find a way to escape its unrelenting doom.
But Daniel! I won't be alive to see that! How can I reach immortality for the time before we burn off?
Alright. Alright, I'll get to it.
The first step to achieving immortality is to acknowledge our mortality. Take for example one of the most well-known figures of mythology: Achilles. Thetis, his mother, foretold that her son's fate was either to gain glory and die young or to live a long but uneventful life in obscurity. We all know what he chose...if you don't. Well, he died in the Trojan war. Achilles realized that the only way he would be remembered would be by dying first, but before doing that he needed to do something worth remembering. Just ask Troy she knows the meaning of being burnt.
But that is stupid, the whole point of immortality is to never die!
Well not always. Remember Achilles, he knew he would die. Yet he knew you would know of him.
