"There is no permanence"

Gilgamesh comes to Utnapishtim, the man that was given immortality by the gods, asking for the secret of eternal life. Utnapishtim replies by saying "There is no permanence" (106). He is telling Gilgamesh that nothing last forever. The world is constantly changing; by the time I wake up tomorrow the world will have changed and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to stop it. This inevitable change gives us a need to try to hold on to the past.

If you drive around you will likely pass one of our attempts to hold on to the past. These large collections of individual monuments dot the landscape. People come to these places to remember the parts of the past. It is same as when Gilgamesh spent seven days mourning the death of Enkidu. Gilgamesh was unable to move on, and it was his grief over Enkidu that caused him to seek out Utnapishtim and immortality. But these memorials have another purpose, they stand as your individual, eternal, legacy.

In these graveyards each person has a piece of stone that says that they were born, they lived and they died. The steady change of the world creates this desire to have something that will last for a long time attached to your memory. Gilgamesh is the same way, “None will leave a monument for generations to come to compare with his” (118).

Although nothing can last forever, people achieve “immortality” in less physical ways. People reach a kind of everlasting existence by being remembered. For most people it is their friends and family, specifically there children, which preserve their memory. Gilgamesh ultimately achieved his immortality threw stories that we have of him, it is now over four thousand years latter and we still know the Epic of Gilgamesh.

heros

If you were to look up “hero” in a dictionary you would get such a vague definition that it is difficult to get a sense of the meaning of the word. It is seems strange that something as universal as a hero can be so undefined. This is it because there is no set definition, no official group of characteristics, for a hero. Every group has it’s own idea as to what a hero is. A hero is the embodiment of ideals of the society that created it.

Look at Beowulf. He is strong, courageous, loyal, generous, and a good king, the perfect personification of Anglo-Saxon heroism, but also boastful and arrogant. The only reason that Beowulf is victorious over Grendel is his arrogance, he says that not only can he kill the monster that all the Danes can’t; he will do it with his bare hands. Would such unnecessary recklessness be found in a modern day hero? Someone casting aside his or her weapon out of ego would be seen as stupid rather than heroic. And after he slays Grendel he goes on to bask in the glory of his accomplishment, this is not something a modern day hero would do. Our heroes must be both strong and modest. But although we might not consider him one today, there is no uncertainty that Beowulf was a hero.

If a hero is the characterization of societies ideals then what would that make a heroine? She wouldn’t be strong and bold, for these are seen as masculine traits. So a heroine would have to depict feminine traits like beauty, sensitivity, and gentleness. It seems so far from Beowulf that that it does not even seem possible that the same word could be used to describe the two.

When Bertold Brecht said, "Unhappy the land that needs heroes." He is saying that happy people don’t need a fictional character to look up to. He thinks that happy people have no need for a hero to come in and defeat the evil. Maybe that’s true, but if it is then the world has never had any happy lands. Or, maybe, even happy people need something to aspire to, they need that vision of perfection to inspire them.