Chapter 2: Legacy
Gilgamesh, the king who tried to conquer death.
Unfortunately as I do not and cannot read cuneiform I cannot describe what was exactly written in the tablets. My very little knowledge of it is only of those which i have of people's understanding. In short, Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk who after his friend died tried to obtain immortality. Whether he the character himself exist is upto debate but it does not matter. He still died.
In the film 'Troy', Achilles ask his mother Thetis what will happen if he went to the invasion of Troy. Upon which she replied telling him that he will die, but will forever be glorified.
So what's the morale of telling these stories, why do they matter. Well, they don't, not really. Humans are fragile creatures, we die easily, we don't live very long and somehow we as a collective are very destructive, hence why we has waged wars. If history have anything to day so, it will agree.
And while we humans as insignificant as we are, we have done great things, build magnificent things, discover and create things and done terrible things. We bulid the pyramids, painted the Mona Lisa, created maths, and have been to the moon. The legacy of a civilization is when it dies and years, decades if not centuries later, that civilization would be discovered and studied. People; researchers, archaeologists would say ' ...they were the forefront of civilization, they discover and innovate.. ' or something along those lines.
And of some places and countries have been synonymous with words; Athens and democracy, Rome and Catholicism, England and industrial revolution USA and Russia for Capitalism and Communism and of course Germany and something something. There's always two sides to a coin, not every legacy is good, terrible and evil things can also be part of legacy and one of such is war.
If there is one thing humans are great at, it's war. While is terrible it breeds innovation and that is why we are so good at. We went from sticks and stones to spears, swords and shields, armours and bows, the innovation of gunpowder led to firearms, arquebus, muskets, revolvers and automatic weapons and to weapons of mass destructions. We were not satisfied with just fighting on land anymore and moved to the seas and the sky. This ' war ' is the legacy of man. This will forever be a legacy.
On a smaller scale, we, I as humans also want a legacy. After all, as much as we may be we are all very selfish and that is why we want a legacy, to be remembered. We are mere mortals and cannot live for long nor for the sake be immortal. However, we can be remembered forever. On the contrary we want to mean something, our live is short and dreary and during our short lived life we truly are desperate for meaning.
Millions of people die every year due to cancer. And the thing about cancer is there really isn't a cure per se. So maybe you do surgery, chemotherapy and so on and you just hope you get better. Amd so there was this one guy, a cancer patient, with one leg. He was of course just another guy who will one day die too, maybe sooner than most. So he did something unbelievable, he ran, the 20 year old kid from British Columbia who had one leg and suffering from cancer ran, he ran with all he could and more till he could no longer. He too died at the age of 22. But unlike others he had a legacy and he will be remembered as Terry Fox.
Like Achilles, we all want to be glorified and we eventually die. To be remembered, to leave a legacy behind for future generations and that is why we strive for greatness, a glory, a meaning. A legacy.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone