15.02.2005., utorak
Valentine's blues
So, another Valentine's day gone by.
T'is such a shitty holyday, don't you think?
Now, one day in a year, we HAVE to celebrate our love. Why? Because EVERYBODY’S doing it. It's the latest thing. Buy an overpriced red rose, spend your last money for a dinner in a restaurant, because THE day AND your peers demand it.
Imagine sitting next day to have coffee with your friends and they ask you: “what did he give you for valentine’s day?” and you say: “nothing.” Oooooooooo, he doesn’t love you! Never mind that maybe he’s working his back off to feed the family or some thing like that, he MUST give you something for Valentine’s day, or he doesn’t love you.
And imagine all those people who are alone on Valentine’s day? I’m surprised that the suicide rate doesn’t skyrocket on February the 14th.
Stupid holyday.
(Meanwhile, wanna hear what I got for Valentine’s day? :))))))) 80GB HD and 256MB RAM :) Thanx honeybunny, the bestest gift ever :) )
Anyway, I was watching Equilibrium last night. I love that movie. I love Christian Bale :))). It’s not that I love him, but I love the guy he is in that movie. Cool, calm, calculated… for the first half an hour at least.
For those of you who didn’t watch this movie, I highly recommend it - for SF lovers mostly; for the others, only those who are inclined to philosophical debates.
It’s an Anime-type futuristic story combining Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell’s 1984 with a bit of Vulcan “no feeling=good feeling” theory. (now everybody who isn’t into SF is confused by this sentence :))). It’s about a society that has abolished feelings, them being the root of all evil on this Earth. A society that works like clockwork, and is about that much exciting (well, I admit, there must be people somewhere that get turned on by clocks. After all, there are people that get turned on by socks).
The beauty of the idea is that with no feelings there would be no crime. If you cannot feel hate, you don’t have a reason to kill. If you don’t feel anger, you have no reason to hurt others. Or yourself.
However, the horror of the idea lies in obliterating all feelings, including the good ones, the ones we believe make us human. Love. Compassion. Empathy.
So while you don’t feel the anger and hate it takes to kill someone, you don’t feel the love it takes to be with someone.
Sad, right?
Why?
Why would it be so horrible to lose our ability to love and hate?
Is forfeiting love to stop all murder and wars such a big sacrifice?
I don’t know.
While the idea of no crime, big or little, does have it’s appeal, and I don’t see a great loss in letting go of the good ones as well, if that’s the price to pay, I do see a great loss on giving up - beauty. I don’t see how we could appreciate beauty without the capacity to feel. Now, why would I be indifferent to the loss of love, but appalled with the loss of beauty?
Well, love is selfish and beauty is divine. The love we feel is a passing thing, but the beauties we create could be an inspiration to countless generations after us. However, we cannot appreciate beauty without love. When something is truly beautiful - a song, a story, a painting - we fall in love with it. Without the ability to love, how could we appreciate beauty? We could, maybe, acknowledge symmetry, or superiority of technique, but we could never stand in a field in a misty spring morning and get lost in a beauty of a sunrise (not that any of us does that. but we could). And get inspired by that same sunrise to write a poem worthy of Keats, or a symphony worthy of Mozart.
So while I think that lack of feeling would make a life easier for an individual (imagine not going through all those nasty months of healing a broken heart. Or not giving a damn of what people think about your appearance. Or not getting annoyed by your work colleagues. Heaven, ha?), I think that it would be a great loss for humanity in general.
But I must admit that the end of the movie was not to my liking. Comparing the savage mob, which at the end sweeps the city, killing, plundering and destroying everything in its way, to the efficiency of order, which, though cold, was ensuring wealthfare for all inhabitants (well, except for those who feel. for them it ensured an extremely warm - incineration), was simply… horrible to watch.
See, this is why I need intelligent people to talk to.
I have all these ideas and no one to share and compare them with. No one to argue with. No one to debate with, until the wee hours in the morning, the impact and significance of emotions on the micro- and macro-cosmos of human society.
I NEED arguments and debates like the fish need water. I feel so empty without a good fight :). And all the smart people I know are either busy or far, far away. You really can’t have a good debate on chat. Or over the phone.
We should get together some time and converse. Like, when I get rich and have to money to visit you. Any of you.
Blah.
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- 20:10 -
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