JacobBlog!

What happens to the characters in all of the great stories after the tale is over and they’ve gone on to live an idyllic future for eternity? What happens to Vincent in the movie Gattaca after he’s made it onto the spaceship, and flies off into the stars to return to a truer home than he ever knew on earth? While the story ends, his life does not, and what I would like to know is how life feels now that he has achieved his greatest dream. What did it feel like to achieve that dream, and what is his life when he gets back home to Earth? Is everything changed irrevocably? Has he crossed some sort of Rubicon?   One imagines that by fulfilling such as deep-seated desire he would have attained a certain nirvana and see the world through a permanent lens of peace. Maybe we should ask real world people who have achieved something of similar magnitude. What was life like for Andrew Wiles after he proved Fermat’s last theorem and achieved the single greatest great dream of his life? Does everything change? We always postulate in some vague way that these people must find some sort of great enlightenment, find a great peace from which it is impossible to ever return. But these people are still living their lives, and they’re still humans, and nothing fundamentally has changed but a few bits of information in their minds. Having lived a proximate version of such a story, I ask this question because I want to find a character like this I can relate to whose life is written by a more brilliant author than myself, whose beautiful stories can provide a model for my own actions and help me substantiate this vague but brilliant beauty I always imagined lay in my future, that I always could see in the distance, but never looked into or past. The unknown can be the source of our greatest fears, but it is also true that in its raw amorphous shape we can see every brilliant future we can imagine is possible to sculpt. To the sculptor, which is more beautiful, an actual sculpture of David or a perfect block of stone that can be David, Saint Teresa in ecstasy, the gates of hell, laocoon and sons, discobolos at once? I suppose that this only depends on the vividness of the artist’s imagination (Note: from a neuroscience perspective, while our memories can prime our visual centers to see something more readily, in normal people it’s not sufficient to generate phenomenal perception of the thing during waking hours. But in our dreams? That is another question.)