Friday, October 17, 2008

"Thalassa! Thalassa!"


…the sea! the sea! cried the Greek warriors after they spent weeks, no, months searching their way back through foreign lands, enduring many hardships.


The land ! The land! Shouted the watchman at the first sight of the foreign continent hundred years of ago, from the ship that searched its way through storms and dead calm for months, or was it years?


Money !Money! cried Annamari when she saw her scholarship funds in her account at the University, after a month and a half of hardship and fighting with the bureaucracy. For the hardships of our life are not in the battles we fight on foreign lands, or in the sailing of foreign seas searching for new continents (after all there are no more continents to be discovered). The hardships of modern life are in the small unnerving events of every day; a scholarship that takes to long to be deposited in your student account, a computer that broke, a bus that is late, the misery of a cold day: "I had been sick as a dog ", she'd say.

"Yes, Anaïs, this is how we die today, slowly, with the miseries of each and every day" said Nim.

"But there is hope, shouted Anaïs, there is faith and there is love".


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful. Very elegant expression of an important idea. I think a time comes when it is important to hang onto the idea of the heroic and the epic in life and in this piece you have traced the connection to the everyday struggle beautifully.