Sunday, May 16, 2010

Heart: Straight or Round?

The way death explains circular hearts vs. straight hearts just makes so much sense to me. I immediately made a mental connection when I read the last paragraph on page 491, because I understood exactly what death meant.

The reason that a human heart is straight is because there is only one reality for each human, There is no diverting off of your own path, there is no stopping, no turning around, no skipping ahead. You are only able to ride the line that is your heart. The heart represents your life, therefore the human life is a line. Some of our lines are longer than others, some are smooth; those lines are easy to ride. Some lines are rough or just have rough patches; these are the lines that the rider must endure, or simply survive. These lines of our lives start at our birth and we ride on them powered only by the force of time until we reach the end of our line, which is undeniably our own death.

Unlike us humans, death's heart is circular. His life is a never ending path with a repeating cycle through various realities, picking up our souls along the way. For him there is no beginning or end. He was never born, and ironically, death will never die. He has no conclusion, no grand finale, no goal, no final destination, he is basically on repeat. Because he has no guidelines or timeline of any sort, it is possible for him to merge realities; he can taste emotions, he can hear colors, he can feel aromas. There is no concept of time for him, which is why he is able to collect all of the world's souls and still have time to notice. As death mentioned himself, who could replace him if he ever left?

Most of us are afraid of death; we are worried about what we happen when we finally do have our encounter with him. On the other hand would you rather exist forever? Death said himself that he envies our ability to die.

So there is the question,

Straight or Round?

2 comments:

  1. The paragraph that you are refering to is one that made me stop and think for a second. When I read that analogy, I stopped because I had never thought of life in such a way before. I had never thought about our line of life and how it is relatively straight except for the bumps in the road and I defintely did not think about how death's life line would look like. But after pausing for some great deal of time,that paragraph did indeed make sense to me. As you said Death never dies and we don't live for ever.

    To answer your question in one sentence, I like my life as a straight line. Now, as humans we constantly talk about eternity and how great that would be. But after thinking about it, living for ever would be the absolute worst thing in the world. After a certain point I would at least be tired of myself and the world around me. Life is such a precious thing BECUASE we don't live forever, but if all of a sudden we start living for ever, life would lose its specialness. If we know that we are never going to die, the rush to prusue certain activites would be lost, because essentially we would have a lifetime do do that activity, right? All and all, human life is better off with the concept of dieing. I mean take death seriously when he says, "Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die."

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  2. This is not my "comment" comment, I just wanted to tell Cole that I really appreciate this paragraph. I had been in a kind of in between state of mind with this idea of circular/straight hearts and now I understand it so much more. So thanks.

    ~Andrea

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