In Defense of Icarus

A personal take on an old legend, and how we are all more similar to the stories than we thought.

In Defense of Icarus

The legend of Icarus tells of a man who is given the gift of wax wings and then almost immediately proceeds to fly close enough to the sun that the wings melt and he falls back to the dirt.

Icarus is easy to judge. Icarus is easy to berate for his hubris. Despite that, I cannot help but identify with the man who has become a cautionary tale.

Maybe when Icarus could finally give his weary feet a rest from the ground, to him, the sun was not the sun. Maybe the sun was every dream he had ever had and he just now has the opportunity to fulfill them.

I choose to believe that we are all an Icarus even if we don’t know it. Maybe your sun is a novel you will never finish. Your sun could be a prescription bottle filled with the kind of ecstasy that makes you forget the pain, your sun could be the person you keep flying close to even though they keep throwing you into the dirt.

The love Icarus harbored for the sun was never meant to end well. Would it have mattered if it was? Would Ophelia still have fallen in love even if she knew it would end with a suicide that even then wasn’t allowed to belong to her?

A thing is not beautiful because it was created for permanency.

Roses wilt in time measured by the days but Juliet still saw fit to compare them to a love worth dying for.

So, perhaps, Icarus’ brief flight into the sun was worth a thousand hard falls to the ground.

Because a few brief seconds of everything that life could have ever been is better than a lifetime standing on the earth.

                -- A.C. // 2:43 AM: My wings are paper filled with lists of regrets.