Music Eicateve – R.I.P
This is a rhythm game-style music track of team “R.I.P.” [I] “To Her Who Journeys Far” from the BMS Event “G2R2018”. This song is dedicated to the memory of a friend of the composer, Eicateve, who passed away at the age of 21. The first half of the track used an extremely dark melody and a high-energy and chaotic beat to express the darkness of death. This made a huge contrast to the second part of the track, where the feeling suddenly turns bright and hopeful. This basically means that death is sort of a determined event, and we cannot change that, but life remains bright if we forget about death itself. In addition, his sudden death also reflects the uncertainty of life and death and suggests that one should live joyfully at every moment so that one would not be regretful.
Artwork Disk of Mictlantecuhtli
Disk of Mictlantecuhtli is a Teotihuacan Culture Stone Sculpture created between 1CE and 600CE. It lives at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, Mexico. The image is used according to Educational Fair Use, and tagged Death in Art, Skulls and Deities and Gods.
It was carved from stone and basically shows a skull face at the center, with a patterned round exterior. The skull creates an intense correlation with death because the skull is a universal symbol that every viewer recognizes as the end of life. At the same time, this work’s circular disk around the whole skull and its strong symmetry make the image feel controlled and ritualized instead of just terrifying people. This contrast suggests that death was not only a violent or unrest nightmare, but also presented as a structured part of the order, and implies that death is an inevitable destination that is spiritually meaningful.
- Teotihuacán Culture, 1 – 600 CE
Short Story A Sound of ThunderLinks to an external site.
Eckels’ awareness of death does not lead to growth but to panic. This largely influenced his subsequent behavior and led to a tremendous disaster. The story talks about the main character, Eckels, who traveled back to the era of dinosaurs and tried to kill a Tyrannosaurus. When Tyrannosaurus first appeared, Eckels was shocked, and shortly, panic and fear came and controlled him, causing him to run out of the path, which was not allowed and would cause a severe problem because it might change the future, even with a tiny interaction with the world. When he first saw the Tyrannosaurus, he said, “It can’t be killed,” which reflects his realization of how weak human beings are, especially in the face of a huge and powerful element. The fear of death largely influenced his following behaviors and indirectly led to the ultimate mistake. This story tells us when we should not be influenced by death and face it directly, because the fear of death might cause panic and loss of reasoning.
Bradbury portrays death as violent and symbolic, as there are actually 2 timelines described in this story, the timeline without human interaction and a timeline when they traveled back. In this story, there are 2 deaths mentioned: the death of Eckels and the death of that Tyrannosaurus. They identified different aspects of death. The fear of death of Eckels is violent and sudden, as he does not think of this at all until he sees the Tyrannosaurus, and as paragraph 1 mentioned, this causes a severe impact both to him and to the future world. The death of Tyrannosaurus is both determined and sudden and symbolic. He illustrates the death of the Tyrannosaurus as “Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell.” The animal dies not as a sudden event, but as a confirmed event, as he describes, “That’s the giant tree that was scheduled to fall and kill this animal originally.” Although Tyrannosaurus would be killed by the tree without human interaction, it is a different thing while human interacted before it. This matters because the death he mentioned here is not meaningful by itself, but the human interference is unexpected, and this unexpectedness would probably cause disaster.
The story suggests that life gains value because of its interconnectedness, not simply because it ends. As Paragraph 1 and Paragraph 2 suggest, the death would cause disaster, and the author categorizes it as violent. In this story, death causes loss of reasoning and then leads to making wrong decisions, and raises a moral conflict of killing an animal. Eckels’ was already meaningful, represented by those fun moments such as traveling back and watching dinosaurs. We can see through Travis’ explanation, “The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake.” This reveals that even the smallest event in a life matters because it sustains an entire future. Death does not give life value, but every single element in life already provides infinite value.