On (Imagining) Being Part of Something Bigger

It is probably a basic human need: the need for association. Throughout the history we imagined being part of something bigger than ourselves, from our families. We visualized things bigger than our villages, bigger than our towns. We imagined bigger communities and called them nations, we did not stay there...we created states. It was this collective imagination that made states possible. We are still trying to find life elsewhere in the universe...and God knows maybe we found what we were looking for. Or perhaps we never will. To conclude my totally unrelated brainstorming session from the scope of this post, I'd like to point out that I absolutely loved Martian Chronicles.

I did not enjoy the SfD, as I made it clear on my previous blog post on the Speaker. I faced a totally different Ender, with an "I am the Chosen One"Syndrome. A syndrome which showed its symptoms by the initial voyagers to Mars in Bradburry's book. "Hey, look at us! We came to Mars! Yeah, we call your planet Mars! etc." A feeling people get when they start to consider themselves as the last Coca-cola can in a desert. Luckily, Bradburry didn't spend 300 pages on showing how we had to think differently of ourselves and of others.

The Chronicles for me did not end when the book concluded. It finished for me at the end of the Night Meeting story of August 2002. I still do not think that the Aliens are wiped out of chickenpox. There is always the possibility that the aliens solved the problem of coexistence with humans between the period of 3rd and the 4th human voyages to Mars. There is a possible explanation that humans are made to believe that the aliens are dead. Perhaps it might be so that we, as humans, just had to take part in that solution without being aware of coexisting with the aliens on the same planet. Of course, by saying this I am totally eliminating the possibility of this book representing the conquest of America...but may be it. There are many conquest stories that fall parallel to that of conquest of America.

On another note, Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind was a good movie-- to an extent that I interpreted it as a cultural exchange programs with the Mars. It was an odd feeling I got out of the film, given that I'm studying here on one of the cultural exchange programs here. Yet it fell into what Ender was emphasizing in the Speaker for the Dead: learning from the other. And to an extent, acceptance that we are part of something bigger that we cannot comprehend. Hopefully with this acceptence we can start to understand what we truly are part to/ of.