Do you fear death?
That's the one line I can really remember from Pirates of the Caribbean. Davey Jones, one of the few great villains of cinematic history, scares the daylight out of me, but I can't but love his flair for the dramatic... and his famous question, dripping with nuance: "Do you fear death?"
As a kid watching this movie, I thought "Who doesn't?" However, as I grew older, I dealt with more things. Firstly, I developed Major Depressive Disorder. It came with some serious problems, and Davey Jones' line stopped being so scary. I certainly didn't fear death. I wasn't alone in that, either; my generation, Gen Z, is infamous for not really caring about death. Most memes about my generation (that aren't about us being scared of cursive writing and rotary phones) feature some major hints at suicidal ideation. It's become a joke, a flippant remark tossed around the lunch table. Suicide is a grim reality for our generation, more so than most generations before us, and so we've made it into a joke to deal with it. Is that truly what we should be doing? A better question could be, should we fear death?
Socrates said that no man who knows that hell waits below him would choose death over defeat (Book 3), but to accept defeat and slavery is a dishonor. He proposes that literature that may cause a fear of death be spurned, and even attributed to being written by the "lesser" sort of men and women. It is interesting to consider that my generation has the most literature ever available to anyone, literally at their fingertips, and still they don't fear death. Socrates may have had some things right, but it isn't literature that creates cowards.
PS Abigail and Isabelle
I think it is interesting that Socrates relates literature to the fear of death. In a sense, Socrates is right. He is only right when the correct book is involved. The book that Socrates would definitely censor because of the possibility to bring a fear of death (plus plenty more reasons) would be the Bible. If someone who does not believe in the saving grace of God read a good bit of the Bible, that person might come to fear death. However, if read to a full understanding, would realize that Jesus is the solution to that fear (and many other things). Something that censorship would not be successful in doing.
ReplyDeleteLiterature often times creates an expectation or representation of specific scenarios that usually plays out differently once we face them in the physical world. For example, one might suggest from reading Homer that death is something that is met with honor, and only comes after one has accomplished everything that they were meant to do. What Homer fails to mention in his writing is all of the seemingly premature, unnecessary, and blatant deaths that are just glanced over in favor of giving the heroes more spotlight than they deserve. I believe that the fear of death was prevalent in Athens due to how they "honored" the dead and called so many young men off to war. In modern society, I'd say that the answer to the question of "Do you fear death?" is the mentality that people take where everyone wants to go to heaven, but none of those people want to actually die. We seek the honor and reward that come, but not the means to achieve it.
ReplyDeleteOooh this was very interesting to read. First off, VERY relatable, it's almost scary the insensitivity that our generation carries when it comes to such deep, depressing topics like suicide. Secondly, as Christians we're taught that death is not something to be feared, because of the knowledge that we will join Christ in Heaven once this life is over. In relation to the ancient Greeks, they didn't have this hope to fall back on and say, "I am not afraid of death", and so this presents an interesting idea of how they dealt with it and conveyed it through their culture and their literature.
ReplyDelete