On watchmen and wonder

i just recently wrapped up reading through the graphic novel Watchmen since friends kept telling me about how this novel changed the superhero genre in comics and how it's a very good story. It was fascinating. The book is one of those written pieces that tackle the question of the common good. 


The graphic novel was definitely a much better medium for the story compared to the movie. i didn't understand the movie but the various side stories and the slow pacing that the novel allowed to wander around the additional subplots that helped explain some of the intricacies that were deftly woven into the main plot.


Novel Highlights


Quote 1. "Dead: I hear her pleading; see their yellowed smiles, their cutlasses carving relentlessly until all her personality, all her subtleties of posture and expression are obliterated, reduced to meat..dead." - Watchmen (Alan Moore)


This struck a chord with me in particular because i never did understand killing especially massacres of the kind committed in Maguindanao on November 23, 2009. i don't understand how people can destroy human beings, who at times, are painfully beautiful, and walk away.  


There seems to be a great lack of understanding in most people's minds of how miraculous life can be. At the same time, as the graphic novel also did illustrate, this lack of understanding has seeped so deeply into the human psyche that no one is safe from it's toxic sewage, not even myself. This part of the book and the story behind it cautioned me to truly evaluate events from a perspective that is not my own, because were i to be motivated by a zealous passion to pursue my idea of justice, i could very well end up destroying those that i think i am fighting for, and in consequence, myself. 


Nietzsche said that "when you stare at the abyss, the abyss stares back at you"; but the abyss is part of us, it already is within is and we are in the abyss. The necessity is for us to be plucked out of it from someone on the outside powerful enough to do so. Much prayer is necessary in order to align my entire being with the will of Him who sees all and knows all because apart from Him, my only aim, and my only end will be destruction.

Quote 2. "Manhattan: 'Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter [...] and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air into gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.'


Laurie: 'But... If me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean you could say that about anybody in the world!


Manhattan: 'Yes. Anybody in the world... But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.


Come... dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.'" - Watchmen (Alan Moore) 


Humans are made of fantastic stuff.