The Conundrum of an Endless Life

 A couple of nights ago, I watched Vanilla Sky. I stepped into it based purely on a recommendation, without any idea of what the subject matter was. Most movies that I've watched recently have inspired little emotion, if any, and so I was pleasantly surprised to find this particular movie so well-crafted. In fact, by the end, I was positive it had to be made based on a book, which is, more often than not, high praise. Alas, it was not written for the screen from a book, but was a remake of another older movie, which was even more of a nice surprise. Vanilla Sky is a car ride into the now-fairly-familiar concept of everlasting life -- preserving one's body in infinite limbo at the seemingly brighter prospect of letting the Soul live on. On the passenger seat of this car is the mysterious Lucid Dreaming. 

Vanilla Sky was a helter-skelter ride until it neared its end, where it had some iconic scenes that have stuck with me since. Before long, I had stopped thinking about the movie and its characters, and wandered off along a tangent of my own thoughts that they inspired. So I want to write about some things that I related to, and some that I reflected upon. 

First off, my absolute favourite scene from the movie was when the album cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan morphs into a snapshot of David and Sophia walking hand in hand. It's a thing we all do: take a thread from a movie or song or book we love, and tie it to our own lives until it becomes almost real, and soon these synaesthetic memories get etched into our minds forever. I love how the movie extrapolated and magnified this idea to snowball into David's entire story.

Secondly, an important and chilling premise in the movie is David's accident. Although at first I thought I'd be moved by thinking of how beauty isn't everything, what really had a more lasting impact on me was just the epiphanous shock of how things can change in the span of one cruel instant. One moment there's a gentle breeze driving the sails, and in the next the boat's swept up into a tornado!

But perhaps the point of this movie is neither of the things that I thought of. Perhaps the point is to simply ask the audience: 

Would you want to live on forever, no matter the cost?

I think the heart of the matter is that what makes our lives not only livable but also meaningful is the desire to do it right. And the incentive for that is that our time here is limited. In an ideal world, the prospect of everlasting life is appealing. But in the real, not-so-ideal world, in some strange and ironic way, the things and the people that mean so much to us do so because we don't get infinite time with them. So each day that I spend not expressing my love, creating art, being grateful, or trying to be kind, is really just one less day I get to do it.