Caught up in Fantasy once again. I've been reading lately, and I've stumbled across something very interesting - that there is no real personification of perennial themes, like good and evil. I bet it doesn't make sense to most, but too bad.
It's like, people possess characteristics, but there is no one defining one that lives in them. Take it this way, a fat person that eats alot can be a glutton, but he is not gluttony personified. Similarly, heroes and villains are good and evil, supposedly, but they are never the characteristic personified.
And us being creatures of empathy that learn from experiences, how do we know then, how these characteristics exist or of their occurance? I mean, we base descriptors upon ourselves, for example, creatures with four legs are not like us, therefore we brand them something else. It all stems from the human condition and branches out from there. But if we are not characteristics personified, how do we know they exist? More importantly, how do we know the true, pure unadulterated form of it?
Take for example, villains are supposed to be bad and evil, ruthless and merciless, etc... But a saying goes nothing is complete without the antithesis that brings it out. Stereotypically, good is good and bad is bad. But to bring out the good in the hero, or the badness of the villain, there is a slight hint of the antithesis within them. The characters then suppress and conquer the antithesis and become more good or evil, but the antithesis lives on. Therefore, there is good in all evil, and vice versa, thus it cannot be pure and unadulterated. If so, how do we know it exists? How do we define it?
What is more intriguing is how we describe ourselves. We can only go to a certain extent of it. If someone says he is musically gifted, how does one measure that? Where is the yardstick? What are the extremes by which he falls between?
What are we made of?
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