Why Vampires Can’t Have It All

Twilight’s Edward Cullen has a problem, and it’s not his sparkly skin. His problem is a complete absence of poetic tension.

Vampirism brings him immortality. It is also delivers eternal, youthful beauty; effortless wealth; fast cars; and tremendous physical strength. What's not to like? Even though Edward claims that being a vampire is a hard and lonely route, the reader is not made to feel this suffering. Even though he speaks of missing out on the normal milestones of humanity, he is ultimately able to marry and to father an equally beautiful child. Edward gets to have it all for free, and that is why he is forgettable.

Vampires of old legends or of contemporary novels like Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian are caught in a very different situation. They possess immortality, yes. But it extracts so heavy a price that it makes their deathlessness a curse instead of a coolness factor: in order to continue their existence, they must live off the deaths of others. Ultimately, the people they once were are no longer alive because they have forfeited their souls. These vampires are difficult to forget. 

Even apart from vampires, enduring literature is always filled with tragic tension. Achilles must choose between a long and comfortable life that will end in obscurity, or an early and glorious death that brings the immortality of fame. Guinevere and Lancelot cannot embrace their passion without destroying their kingdom (and themselves). In Les Miserables Jean Valjean cannot retain his integrity without sacrificing the success that his integrity made possible. Even the characters in Lord of the Rings pay for their choices: Frodo is never again able to belong to the Shire that he helped to save. Arwen must walk alone in the empty woods of Lothlorien after her beloved Aragorn dies. There is a reason that we humans write this kind of story over and over again, and it is not merely a crude realization that no lunch in life is free.

Did You Know That You Are Crazy?

Then I heard the ol' man say

God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy

From People are Crazy by Bobby Braddock and Troy Jones (sung by Billy Currington)

The human mind is a chamber of conflicting desires and hidden belief. Our minds play tricks on us. Sometimes they lead us to eat ice cream when we want to lose weight. Sometimes they let us confess secrets to an untrustworthy confidant. Sometimes they tell us that the rules needn’t apply to us, specifically, in our unique situation, and so it would be O.K. to pinch the office postage or cheat on our spouse even though we generally abhor stealing or cheating.   

We use the oddness of our mind to avoid obligations that loom too onerously. One age-old avoidance mechanism of mankind has been to romanticize the things that we do poorly. Consider our modern approach to marriage. We have raised the romance bar so high that a spouse must be our eternal soul-mate; our wedded life must be perpetual emotional bliss; and we mustn’t risk committing to anyone until we've dated and/or lived with them for years. In celebration of this marriage concept we spend an average of over $28,000 on each wedding: gowns, gazebos, D.J.s, and all that jazz. We glorify the beaming bride as if she were a combination of Nobel Prize winner, actress, and heir to the throne simply for accepting a diamond ring. We make far more of a fuss over the marriage ceremony than did previous generations, yet our rate of divorce is far higher than theirs. We are not the first culture to romanticize our weaknesses. Consider the ancient Romans: they did not write the Aeneid, that paean to olden virtue and strict duty, during their supposed glorious age of moral uprightness. Instead it was written in the "decadent" generation of Augustus. Did his patricians give up their self-indulgent lifestyle just because they enjoyed the epic tale of Aeneas? No (much to the great Caesar’s regret), but they were quite happy to glorify the virtues of the past.

Variations on Normal, and How to Control the World

I can tell you how to shape a society, and how to lose a culture war.

Do you understand the diabetic who is told that he will die within months unless he changes his diet, yet refuses to give up the junk food? Can you relate when a woman allows her boyfriend to use her as a punching bag? Most of us are frustrated or bewildered to see these people behaving so differently from how we think they should.

The thing is, we humans possess a malleable sense of normal. We adapt to what we see around us and to the experiences of our daily lives. This helps us to survive. In societies where childhood mortality is high, parents grieve the loss of a child, but they are unlikely to thrash about in a morass of outrage and bewilderment. In a culture where premarital sex is considered typical, fewer people refrain from it. If something is “normal,” we begin to feel that we deserve it. It is hard to control our diabetes if doing so demands that we give up our “right” to a “normal” lifestyle. It is hard to escape abuse if we think that we deserve this “normal” behavior. Normal is powerful because it is one of the fundamental, unexamined assumptions from which we respond to all of life. Normal feels true.