Greetings once again, my friends and fellow bloggers. I have been thinking a lot about the concept of the tradgic hero recenetly. I have been reading the Rurouni Kenshin manga over the past week and I am at a part in the storyline where the hero, Kenshin, faces the most crushing of all defeats, the breaking of his heart. And I am reminded of the war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. There is a theme in many of Hemingway's novels that highlights the concept of endurance or more poignetly, endurance of suffering. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, there is a peripheral character, one of the antagonists in fact, who speaks about the need for penence, penence not just as individuals, but penence for a whole people, in recompence for the tradgy and suffering brought on all people, the innocent and the guilty, the aggressor and the victim, because all people, good and bad, suffer. And in my reading of Hemingway, what I take from the stories like For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Fairwell to Arms, is that penence and recompence are key elements of heroism. This is why I like Rurouni Kenshin so much...the manga and the character of Kenshin. Kenshin is a character who is a reformed manslayer, a killer and assassin in a civil war, who has tasted too much blood and suffering and takes an oath to live in peace. But Kenshin's oath is more than one never to kill again, his oath is to protect the innocent from those who would do them harm. The recognition is that, whether one causes suffering or whether one suffers in turn or - as so often is true - one both causes and feels suffering, one can and should bring more to the world than one takes from it. But, that alone is motivation...what is far more important is that one act upon that motivation to make the world a better place. Even small contrabutions matter. And, I think, that even small contrabutions add up, they matter.
I leave you now with this poem by John Donne, 1624, as my parting thoughts...
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
May some happiness touch upon your day.
ST'Q