![]() ![]() Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning.Įchoing Milan Kundera’s admonition about knowing what we really want, he considers how modern culture cauterizes the heroic impulse within us: Ernest Beckerīecker - whose concept of the hero is not dissimilar to Leonard Cohen’s concept of the saint - writes: How to own our heroism and our cosmic longing is what the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (September 27, 1924–March 6, 1974) explores in his 1973 classic The Denial of Death ( public library), published just before his untimely return to the Ultimate. The ability to do that is the deepest root of heroism and our mightiest, most vulnerable means of wresting meaning from our mortality. ![]() ![]() ![]() “What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” And yet one of the supreme challenges of humans life is, to borrow Rilke’s lovely phrase, to “go to the limits of your longing” - to fully surrender to your suffering, to fully step into your hope and own your desire for a grand life, desire not fueled by the grandiosity of ego but aimed at the grandeur of the cosmos that betokens our longing for homecoming to the Ultimate. ![]()
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