To Live, not Survive

Pixar has a history of making entertaining movies that hit home on a variety of levels. My son loves to watch them, and so do I. As if it wasn't enough that they were pleasant and funny, they also address issues that we as a culture are wrestling with, if not in the mainstream, at least sub-conciously.

Wall-E was one such movie. Sure, there's the environmental issues, and the moral about laziness, and what not; all good things to think about. There are even "Cave" moments, as humans who had long ago lost sight of real things are awakened to gaze once again in wonder at the stars.

But what makes me well up inside everytime is actually a line that comes from the human captain as he struggles against he rogue auto-pilot. The "Auto" is telling him that the ship cannot return to Earth, due to secret directives from the last President of Earth, and his clinching argument is that because of this plan, "Mankind will survive," to which the human captain replies, "I don't want to just survive; I want to live!"

It gets me everytime.

I am in the midst of struggling to impart the legacy of the West to my students, and they frequently wonder if all the extra work they are called upon to do for the sake of their educations is really worth it. Their peers elsewhere are freer after school than they are; they have been working to learn how to write in ways that no students their age in America write, to master a language that hasn't been commonly spoken in in over a 1000 years, and to engage in the art of logic as 8th graders. On an average day, I will repeatedly hear the question, "But, why...?"

And though my answer will vary in type, it remains the same in its message; because the things worth having come at a cost, and the prize that you seek is actually valuable, and thus we should expect to have to sacrifice in order to gain it. I tell them that comfort and ease are not, in and of themselves, the highest goods we can attain; that as with atheletes in training, pain is just a natural part of the road that we must walk if we would grow and be more than what we naturally are.

If we would do more than merely survive, we must endure pain, fear, possibly even death. Survival as a goal is hardly worth fighting for. Life is more than comfort or even actually being physically alive. Pixar, in a Chestertonian spirit, shows us that the pursuit of life requires a willingness to lose one's life, even as one fights to keep it.