Quote of the Week?

Here's something new. Maybe I'll keep up with it, maybe I won't, but I feel like doing it regardless.

"Le mystère de l'amour est plus grand que le mystère de la mort."
- Oscar Wilde

One of my favorites, actually.

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1854, during the Late Victorian Era. He was a prolific writer of plays, poetry, journalism, and novels. Wilde was known for his flamboyance in dress and speaking, famous for his impeccably sharp wit and conversational abilities. He helped to popularize the concept of aestheticism, or "art for art's sake". He made it clear that he preferred art to nature in many ways, exalting the creativity and decadence of mankind's artistic tendencies. It states that morality and art are two separate entities, that art not only doesn't have to be useful but that true art should not be useful in any sentimental or moral way. Art should be designed to be a pleasure to the senses over all else.

The quote, from Wilde's play Salome, is French for "the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death." I interpret it as the comparison between the within and without in all of our humanity - love is "within," an internal feeling that we produce inside ourselves, contrasted with death being the "without," an external actor that affects every living thing. Using this logic, Wilde seems to suggest that introspection is the key to discovering ourselves and pushing ourselves closer to the "wholeness" we all subconsciously strive toward.

It is not to say that the mystery of death is wholly unimportant. External forces acting upon humanity and its collective psyche are important simply because they act. Perhaps we will never find out why death exists, or what universal forces (entropy?) make it necessary. But really, it's the same logic and rationale that people have when it comes to space travel - why should we go out looking for more puzzles when we have plenty to solve right here? Why should we venture out into the cold reaches of inhumane death when inside each and every one of us is carrying around a massive amount of secrets if we'd only look inward?

In a less romantic view, love and death are simply different states in what amounts to a finite state machine of a brain. Different chemical configurations flooding neurons with what we interpret as a "feeling," or lack of one in the second case. Are we simply the sum of our parts or have we become more? It's hard to argue that we're not more, in my opinion, with the sentience we've achieved, the art we create, and the constant need for more we're compelled to feel as living things. Though until we figure that out, it's also pretty easy to argue that we're simply the sum of our parts. With drugs available that can make us feel a specific way, flood us with dopamine and seratonin, happiness seems truly like "just another state of mind."