Everyday Canvas

Booking the Dance of Life

Prompt: "Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read." Cassandra Clare Do you agree with this?

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If the metaphor of life is a book, then it should have an infinite number of pages left, and therefore, even with the most number of pages that each one of us can read, the number of pages left should not finish at only a thousand but extend to infinity.

The mystery of the unseen is always limitless, and just how can we measure something like life? With our five senses?

Our eyes cannot see the smallest nor the largest. Actually, cats can see things we cannot imagine seeing. Our sense of smell is much worse than a dog’s. Our sense of taste is just barely adequate to taste the food we’re given. Our ears cannot decipher all the vibrations in the air, and if they did, we each would have acted like a radio. What we touch we only feel the coarser features of it and not its subtleties. All this goes to show that what we call our limitlessness is much tinier than the limitlessness of life.

Yet, I can’t say I know the secret of life or how vast it is, knowing that life is the most twisted phenomenon, full of cheap tricks. What I just said may sound like I am demeaning life. In one sense maybe, but in another sense, I think life is a magical mystery. Actually when I first read the quote and thought about life, the vision of a painting jumped into my mind. The Dance of Life by Edvard Munch, the same guy famous for his Scream. The Dance of Life is in the series called The Frieze of Life, intended to give a clear view of life and the situation of the modern man of 1899.

The Dance of Life can be interpreted on different levels. The biological cycle of human existence is evident as the ages of the figures vary. The way the people dissolve into the background shows that the human destiny is not separate from the rhythm of nature. This painting, even together with the others in the series, cannot begin to show the vastness of life, even if created by a highly perceptive painter as Munch.

Still, I don’t blame Edvard Munch or Cassandra Clare to make such outrageous claims as to define or hint at the boundaries of life. After all, if we shoot for the stars but hit the moon instead, isn’t that a big success, still?