What struck me about A Frozen Journey was when it was said that Victor Kemmings was 206 years old. It seems almost impossible to live for so long and still have any part of your sanity. With the regrets and guilts piling up over so many years. Many cultures such as the Ancient Greeks or the Ancient Norse even acknowledged this with their gods who, although they were wise and powerful, had a tendency to do crazy and ridiculous stuff.
In Greek mythology when Persephone was kidnapped by Hades the gods decided that the obvious solution to the problem was to let the kidnapper keep her for 6 months because she ate 6 pomegranate seeds. Now that doesn't make sense and even an Ancient Greek would have told you that that doesn't make sense, but that's what the gods decided to do and they're all powerful and not exactly sane, so it’s probably not the best plan to start questioning what they do.
Something similar in Norse mythology was when Loki killed Baldr and knew that the other gods were going to be angry at him. His solution and probably the most obvious solution was turn hide as a salmon, a fish that humans don’t have a particularly hard time catching. Unsurprisingly the gods found him without much trouble and then put him in a cave on Earth with acid dripping on him where he now causes earthquakes and volcanoes, as opposed to putting him somewhere on any of the other 8 realms without humans on them.
Victor was less than 10 years old when both of the traumatic events in the story happened meaning that he still has 196 years of traumatic events after those that he is repressing and keeping down inside of himself. He doesn't even seem as if he's that old so it's entirely possible that he may live through another 200 years or more of them leaving him just as insane as the gods.
I agree that the idea of living that long is kind of insane. However, I think that as long as your mind isn't affected by disease, you could reasonably be sane for hundreds of years. You would have to change your life around (by getting a new job, for example) every few years to keep from getting bored. I can see your point about how living thousands of years would make you wacky if not insane by normal human standards.
ReplyDeleteI really found the reference to mythology interesting here, as it's very out of the box thinking, but still makes a sensible point. I think in the story they passively mentioned that they had techniques to halt aging, so that may explain why he's been alive for so long and still stays relatively young.
ReplyDeleteI didn't even think about going over such a huge factor because it was presented so briefly in the story. I agree with what your saying a bit, and I think that just outside of the two-times-as-long lifespan is where thing start to blur, meaning that I that once he got to around the 150 year mark, all instabilities he had beforehand, like possible self perpetuating paranoia, intensified, and he would suffer from indistinguishable memories and recal inhibition (basically, his mind became a blender).
ReplyDeleteI agree that living that long seems terrible and crazy, but I wonder if people before us thought like that too. Like a long time go I'd think living to be 80 or 90 seemed insane and terrible, but now a lot of people do it, so maybe in the future living that long would just be the norm.
ReplyDeleteThis was a really different connection. I enjoyed reading this. I feel like Victor is hard to sympathize with and I kind of want him to just suck it up. But even looking at our ancient history/ancestors we see that we've always had crazy tendencies. Perhaps he doesn't want an easy punishment and believes he should suffer, eta Wise Blood.
ReplyDeleteWow! I never even thought of connecting his mental state to his age. They never answer the whole aging question of the mind vs the body. I've wondered before if the extent of the effect of humans having longer life spans (as we do now) on mental health (Alzheimer's, etc.) Is there a way to extend the longevity of a person with a reasonable sacrafice?
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ReplyDeleteSolid. I wonder how much of Freud's theory of repression is true. Do desires and traumas really get bigger and more intense the longer we repress them? What if we don't keep re-living them again and again, but move on with our lives? Do they still fester and grow?
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