The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.

—- From The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Sir Walter Scott (quoted in Groundhog day)

… watched two movies before dawn. March of the Penguins, and Groundhog day. Good movies, especially the first. It’s amazing what amount of fuss the Penguin movie has gotten itself into when people started expounding and extrapolating from what is initially a documentary about the penguins in the cold wastelands of antartica. They went so far as to challenge evolution on grounds that something so "intelligent" and "complex" couldn’t have been a byproduct of natural selection (or any related random process). Ultraconservatives have extolled the movie’s portrayal of the Emperor Penguins’ social structure and thus furthered their agenda by lambasting non-traditional family setups in humans. What was a movie about penguins became an anthromorphic exposition. Unfortunately, though the penguins were monogamous, they remain as such for only a year and by the next  cycle of mating season, they pair with another.

Like the director has said (maybe countless times), why can’t we let penguins be penguins and humans be humans, and for that matter, let the movie be just as it is: without any agenda or cultural bias, but a product of his intention to let people know what the march of the penguins was like on the darkest places in this earth.

“But what of the worlds beyond the river of death?” she persisted.

“There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people,” answered Conan. “In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm o

f clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.”

Bêlit shuddered. “Life, bad as it is, is better than such a destiny. What do you believe, Conan?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom’s realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer’s Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

— from “The Black Lotus”, The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian, by Robert E. Howard