The Importance of Being Mortal

I get cold easily so I don't like this cooler weather; ergo I'm not the fan of Fall that so many people are. That said, Fall means Brunswick stew and I do love me some Brunswick stew.

So today I went to Oregon Hill to pick up my quart of stew from the do-gooding folks at SynerGeo, a group dedicated to enriching the lives of children and families through the arts, education and cultural awareness (coincidentally, the three things I seek out every single day besides eating).

Yesterday they'd had their big, black cauldron out on Laurel and Idelwood cooking it up and today I was collecting the fruit of their labor, in all its smokey goodness.

The choices were regular stew (yes, please!), bacon-less stew (but, but everything's better with bacon!) and vegan stew (so not me). I'm not constitutionally capable of choosing anything bacon-less if there's any possibility of pig so "A" was the option with my name on it (both literally and figuratively actually).

With that important task out of the way, I moved on to the Mediterranean Society's lecture, "The Importance of Being Mortal: Achilles and Greek Heroism" at UR (and, it should be noted, I found Jepson Hall without a single missed turn or unnecessary loop. A first for me on that god-forsaken campus).

William and Mary's Micheal Halleran gave the talk about the first great hero of Western literature in an engaging voice using plenty of popular vernacular ("Achilles' mom was a hottie,") and with references to pop culture (I may not watch TV but I know a Sopranos reference when I hear one).

Achilles dilemma of choosing fame, glory and an inevitable early death or settling for an average life and eventual death were the thrust of the talk.

That and the "culture of shame" that judged men and created their definition of self by their standing in the community. Clearly ours is not such a culture; isn't shame exactly what gets so many people their 15 minutes of fame?

Of course, without Homer having memorialized Achilles in The Iliad, he would have been just another forgotten warrior. Halleran shared that Alexander the Great lamented that he didn't have a Homer to poetically commemorate his great deeds so that his legacy would live on. It's true, we all need a Homer, don't we?

I have a good friend who recently started dating a guy 11 years her senior and suddenly she's become aware of her own mortality (it was there all along, I swear, but apparently she hadn't noticed). I saw her last week and she kept saying, "We're all going to die. Like soon. What's the point?"

I don't know, a potential 50 years or more with this new love? I think she's looking at its all wrong. Personally, I'm going full-speed ahead knowing very well I'll eventually be dead meat.

She needs to take a page from Achilles' book and embrace her mortality. Look where it got him.