You know how we watch movies like Head in the Clouds and De-Lovely, Romeo and Juliet, Gangs of New York, Braveheart and wonder at how passionate those times and the people that had lived in them were, and ask ourselves if we’ll ever see that in our time. True passion, fervor for certain values that are strongly telling of the human spirit, her resilience, her desires, the want to fight for what she knows is right and to be her right.
Whenever I watch movies like the aforementioned, or read books by Dumas, Hugo, maybe even James Clavell I’m always left with a sense of how breath-taking people seem to live in them. People that would die for what they believe in, impossibly morally high characters living side by side by with characters that have no scruples what-so-ever. All these are stories of course, but I feverently believe that stories are rarely exaggerated (people do live lives that are as frantic as Becky Sharp’s, and life is infinitely more capricious then our imaginations, if we allow it to be) and there are people that live life as single-mindedly as some characters do.
I cannot get enough of people that know what they want, and that want all the beautiful things life has to offer them. But it’s not enough to just know, they need to believe they’ve the right to it, and that it’s possible. Everything really is possible, and I don’t believe we are living in a bland age where nothing exciting ever happens, where everyone is apathetic and uninterested in anything aside from making life a little more bearable for themselves.
Trying to look through the lenses of people that see life like that would be a very depressing thing indeed. At one point in my life, I’d been really afraid of what I thought was the Singaporean status quo. You know, where you went to Junior College, went to NUS or one of the state run universities, found a boyfriend there and promptly get married after a couple of years of working. I couldn’t stand the idea, and I suppose a large part why I (and I really believe, many of the women here) live life with vivacious sensuality.
I had been talking a few boys about this lately, and someone I used to date (local guy) was complaining about the dating scene in the country. Sure, the dating scene may be extremely lame, all the smart people who live worthwhile lives are too busy living to be out meeting new people, but the sex scene certainly isn’t. Dating and sex can be two different things; dating is just one of those things where you may end up spending time with someone you find a drag to be with, with no alternative pleasure to make up for it, while sex… Sex is fun and if you know who you’re fucking and you’re responsible about it, you’ll end up with a pretty cool night under your belt to think about for awhile. To me, it’s the difference between watching a game on TV and actually playing it. (You can tell that I nearly never watch sports on TV. And I find one of the most annoying things in the world watching Sport on TV while I’m on the treadmill).
I don’t think these are times that are any less passionate then the eras extolled in movies and books, with powerful virtues imprinted like the one on the poster for Moulin Rouge. Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love. I think deep inside, these are things that we all want to feel, rules we would like to live by, because they are rules to being truly alive and truly free.
The principal of a school I’d attended once told me that it would make things better for us all if we (as student) operated within the confines of the institution’s regulations. That within the set rules, we could do just about anything we wanted. Back then, I though, ‘what bullshit’. Not that I think the rules are any more sensible now (things like not being able to embrace your girlfriend because that’s really kinda a gay activity) but what she’d said wasn’t entirely untrue.
Everyone has a point in life they want to get to, and there are always guidelines to get to that point. Cupido told me to write down what I wanted to be, what I wished for myself in the immediate future and to figure out the best way to get there. Because unless you know clearly, where you’re destination is, you’re going to take one hell of a long time before you get there.
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