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The Role of the Idol

Reverence for an idea, like a person, inevitably disappoints in delivery. Expectations are constructed through each product of genius, distorting the line between fact and fantasy. It is near impossible to accept the little which divides us from those who enact our dreams. Part of the fantasy is to see the person as beyond human, that the greatness extends beyond the situated ground of most. But success is not provided through divine right, it is self-selection; the courage to veer away from the trampled soil of countless lives prior.

Carl and Eli, brought together through the worship of an idol, let the dreams fade in favor of passion. The new adventure was endearing monotony, and come her death, the sacrifice resulted in lonely discontentment and bitterness. This couple displayed the impossibility of stagnation. The house was purchased because of proximity, to all the amenities that compliment rather than build upon love. But progress does not pause for the individual, and the beauty of a renovated home returned to decay. Cheap thrills, quick dollars, rapidity all attack the senses of an old man who longs to enter a memory.

During the moments when melancholy fails to compete with exterior development, dreams return - without the parental anxiety, or the carefree pursuits of youth or the loving restrictions of marriage – and the mature mind can finally embrace the fantasy once desired. Yet just as that which surrounds us changes us, the dreams that provided grounding change in scope. Balloons cannot distort time, or place us into the memories which fill our thoughts because these memories were created through maintaining the fantasy, the hero, the dream of childhood. And through sharing this unattainable majesty with another, love can trump adventure in favor of becoming adventure itself. The Angel Falls connected Carl to Eli, and as it changed him from a shy young boy into a passionate old man, it directed him into accepting the necessity to keep living, illustrating that the arrival of an old dream is never as good as the journey.