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meloncholy of the antique world |
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written
by joelnish / 08.30.2005 |
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| melancholy of the antique world |
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We fool oursevles in our modern world with cell phones, cars and electric toasters into thinking that life is something that we can separate from the natural ebb and flow of life and death. I cannot say that I know much of death and perhaps by extension my understanding of life is also stunted but I at least know that this is not the way the ancients lived. I have always detested Hobbes but the more time I spend in Rome the more I realize that at least for a part of the Roman populace life was short, brutal and probably solitary. The colosseum seems to me a testament to this fact. A Christmas and Halloween of death. Yet how could it be that regardless of one's power they would all ultimately die? Why could it be that all of human achievment and power could not extend the life of the most powerful king or warrior by a second? Shouldn't there be a person singula in power that was truly free from the specter of death? In a certain sort of way the coloseum was the world's greatest laboratory designed to test these questions, to see the strongest face death like the weak spectators would eventually. The results were always the same, no one would have thought that there was immortality past the coloseum. Death was a concrete fact to be held, seen and reveled in. It was the distinction between the immortal and the mortal and the knowledge of which man was that created the "melancholy of the antique world". I see the "melancholy of the antique world" like the feelings of a person tied to a railway line. At first they panic, but after they grow tired of panic and realize the stregnth of the ropes that bind them all that is left is to look into the front of the train as it creeps toward them from the horizon, entranced by the elaborate design of their own demise.
In such a state I suspect that the warior was in a unique position as no other position was so honest about their about own mortality. From the modern perspective it would seem ironic that any kind of power could come from a system that offered so little hope. The ancients though did find a way to kind of transcend mortality though, if only for a few seconds. Today we call it "the zone" but true "berserker" moments in battle were supposed to be beyond any sense of life or death. Indeed, I suspect that the gladiators who where ultimately the most loved, respected and looked up to were the ones who faced death with the understanding that they where already dead once they stepped into the ring, releasing them from the molassis of doubt and worry. I believe a similar notion is found in the Aenid, that in order to survive a warrior must accept and overcome his own mortality by completely accepting it. I do know that the samurai of Japan had the same notion which is why they constantly meditated on their own death.
I wonder if melancholy is the right word though.
My first impression of Flaubert's quote left me bewildered, how did the ancients come to this conclution? Yet their experience was so viceral and real and ours seems so detatched and cerebral. In some ways there is more mystery in the question of how modern man come to such a different conclusion.
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