Ineradicable Icarus

How many of us are trapped in a maze, on a island, or some other geographic prison, and what is the way out? In my estimate, there are two basic types of people: those who celebrate reason, and those who vilify it, either by directly attacking it, or by apologizing for not being able to stand its glow. If you know my story, I belong to the former group. My father belongs to the latter. While we were both trapped, his distase for the mind, for thought, for action left him only the ability to lament and complain about our captive state. He accepted it without a shrug in defiance, accepted as a fact of existence that man was meant to suffer and stagnate and die. I, with my integrated mind and ambition, knew that man was meant for more. Walls, prisons, islands, nations, worlds could not hold him - if his rational mind was his guide to reality around him. Grasping the nature of reality, understanding its consitutents to the point that I could manipulate them, I made for myself and my father wings from wax and feathers - for us to fly from our prison. My father was barely able to float above the walls to deposit his cynical body on free ground, but I . . . I soared above the walls, above the lands, flew outwards and glided above the free waves and among the free flying birds. My mind, my body, my purpose, my action - all one, all for one goal: to assert my life as an absolute. If I have a fault, it would be that I aspired to too great a goal: I wanted to feel the sun. I wanted to touch that which gave forth only warmth, light, life. I wanted to sit by the master of the world, not as some inferior being with his head bent in homage, but as an equal, as another who was responsible for the creation of a world - my own. But, as I neared my equal, the heat melted the wax which held my wings together, and sent me plummeting back to earth, where I died. But death is not something to fear - it is a metaphysical fact ans as such cannot be avoided. Shoudl I have landed safely on the ground, and walked next to my father, that despicable man who loved and hated his entire existence - hated it because he was meant to, and loved it because he was told to? Should I have wandered the maze or the prison or the island, memorizing the geography of a world created and maintained by my captors, all the while greatful for the opportunity? No, fuck that. I flew towards the sun with my mind as my only tool, and although I died while accomplishing my goal, that is no deterrent to my purpose: to celebrate life, as an efficacious individual. In that context, death is unimportant."All men die, not every man really lives" -William Wallace, "Braveheart" ..2 favorite movie of all time."Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things" -Andy Dufresne, "The Shawshank Redemption" ..1 favorite movie of all time.