Immortality in Love

Humans know all too well their mortality, the impending death, the end of all they've ever known, the end of their life, the end. Love is the same. It's complicated and can leave one feeling the happiest they've ever felt to a most depressed state the next hour. Immortality and love can be two separate entities or completely intertwined and relatable to one another. In Plato's Symposium he lectures about the relationship between life and art with immortality. There are many different types of loves: love of people, love of art, love of life, etc. Love and the chance for immortality are very tempting but can make one feel powerless, cornered, and helpless. They then feel the urge to do whatever they can in order to obtain the forbidden fruit of immortality, either with or without love. Using examples of love, art and, wisdom, Keats's poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" provides evidence for Plato's exploration of the many faces of love.

Plato believes that man's desire to reproduce is a product of their desire for immortality. By a certain age, men and women begin to feel an urge to reproduce, an urge for marriage and sexual relations with another. Producing a child with a likeness to their parents are those parents' way of gaining a sense of immortality for "-procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they can never be" (Plato). It's why men are always chasing women, as shown in "Ode to a Grecian Urn" where a man will forever be chasing after his love. Keats and his readers know that the man and his lover may not still feel love for each other once they have consummated, "All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue" (Keats). Love is painful, and can often be misinterpreted as sexual desire. They want and need the continuation of their line and beliefs. "...for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old" (Plato). The next generations is what keeps the past going. Today are those generations, keeping artists and writers such as Shakespeare and Picasso as well as Plato himself along with their beliefs alive even today. Love, love for the generations, and sexual desire are often mistaken with each other. Some are attracted to one other due to pure desire, others for the desire of children and generations and copies of themselves. This is part of man's love of immortality. The mere desire for sex and the desire to have children is the first of the many faces of love.

The second face of love and immortality is the love of the past and current pieces of art and culture. With luck and skill, a single piece of art can immortalize the artist. Whether it be a painting, a sculpture, a poem, a play, or even an essay; those pieces of work that survive the harshness of time allow those artists and those depicted in the pieces to be remembered for a very long time. Today, Shakespeare and his plays play a large role in numerous English and Literature classes today. Furthermore, his plays have been turned into musicals in Broadway as well as in the film industry. In John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", he talks of a single urn depicting a picture of a man forever chasing a woman. Although the man will never catch the woman and experience that kiss he so desires, "yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!" (Keats). Keats explains that even though the man will never fulfill his