Saving Superman

I was walking home one day in the evening, and I started thinking about how those people who are so emotionally sturdy remain that way. Then I realized; they don’t. Truth of the matter is, everybody would fall one day, nobody is built such that they are able to withstand incredible amount of punishment, emotional, mental or physical, and still remain standing, metaphorically, literally (pardon the innuendo). There would be one day, when something or someone just pushes them over the edge, and the long way down they go, until they hit rock bottom; The vulnerable state that everyone is left in when they just asplode. *Poof* brain short circuited, heart broke, whatever, you get the drift. And this quotation puts the results fairly accurately, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”. The agents of change are the only permanent thing in this world. Pillars of strength would crumble; mountains can be worn to dust given time. You can say that the same results would happen with something much weaker and softer than rocks and metal, the human mind, body and heart.

You might say, “what do rocks and human beings have to do with each other?” Actually, physical geography and Literature are really much more alike than people make it out to be. Both of them are about the study of pressure and time; both on the thingamajigs and whatchamacallits on planet Earth. One made of sticks and stones, the other made of flesh and bone. Come to think of it, most Artsy subjects are based on the study of time and pressure. History is the study of time and pressure on a collection of people. Economics is the study of time and pressure on monetary issues. But I digress. As I was saying, Literature is the study of time and pressure on human beings. It focuses on the flaws and strengths of human beings. However, since each of us is unique, in the end many flaws and strengths come out, and that’s why we have something to study. If all of us had only 1 flaw or strength, we needn’t study lit. Our life is full of tragedies and triumphs. Tragedies are what happens when we fall. And in my perspective, much of our life events, or rather how we perceive much of our life events, we perceive them as tragedies. We are the hero of our story. Every tragedy has a tragic hero, with a tragic flaw. The tragic flaw is the main reason why the hero falls. The more upright, virtuous, strong willed, etc. they are, the harder they fall. The same way John Proctor fell in the Crucible because of one mistake – his adultery with Abigail. The same way Oedipus fell – through a sick twist of fate, his ambition and lust. The same way I fell when I trusted too much in love. Each and every one of us would have fallen at one point of our life. The only thing that matters after that is how we pick ourselves up. “Why do we fall Master Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up,”

“Hope? Hope, my friend is a very dangerous thing. It can drive a man insane,” that line was said by Morgan Freeman in “The Shawshank Redemption”. The issue of hope has always been a topic of controversy. Like adrenaline is poison to the body as well as a necessity to strive to be better, hope is like a poison to the heart, that can drive a man to do incredible feats. Yet to hope is like walking on a thin thread between sanity and insanity. It’s true, hope can drive a man insane. Hope has caused the downfall of the strongest man. Hope, coupled with love, is the deadliest combination one can ever inflict on an individual. Love is the force that can bind 2 souls for eternity. It is powerful and unpredictable. Hope is the force that can drive someone to strive fanatically for something. To strive for a force that is forever binding and when bound, unbreakable, one courts with the mysteries at the very depths of the heart. The deepest darkest corners where when once brought into light, can never be hidden in the shadows again. When one hopes, one by one these little corners are brought into light. When one loves, the heart is left open and vulnerable to disappointments. To open one’s heart and to hope at the same time is to expose your heart to the light at its most vulnerable. To me, that’s insane. Sometimes the light is too strong that it burns the heart and the heart once burnt, takes forever to recover. The number 1 reason why people fall is because of love. I’ve seen people love obsessively and when rejected, or when they break up, it destroys them entirely. And the phenomenon of once bitten twice shy begins. They refuse to love, and refuse to let others love them. And when that happens, when the one for them comes along, they convince themselves that he/she’s not the one and continue minding their own business. They are loved, but do not love back. The person of their dreams keeps on loving them and they do not reciprocate. In the end, the person fades out of their life as though he wasn’t there at all. And it’s then that they finally realize that they have just missed out their happy ending. When they try to get them to love them back, they are already long gone, and once again, the poor heartbroken individual is left in the lurch.

The mighty will fall eventually. Every society at the peak of their development will decline. Like how China rose and fell and rose again. Like how America was one of the most backward countries previously but rose to be a world power. However, they are on the decline again and once again China will be a world power. The cycle of life continues no matter how hard one tries to stop it. One may say that the fate of everyone is predestined. I prefer to think it as although the world has developed, human beings have not. We are so obsessed with external influences that we hardly look into ourselves and address the problem that has been plaguing our species for centuries.