I was well into adulthood when it dawned on me that I am not the hero of my own story. There were strong indications of this fundamental reality all along, but my powers of perception are weak. So little do I know myself that I mostly blame relationships or circumstances for my suffering. Looking back, this is ludicrous. Take my college years, for instance. A few weeks into my freshman year, I met a boy and promptly fell dizzyingly in love. He had blue eyes and broad shoulders and a melancholy, intellectual soul, and I knew deep down in my desiring heart that this was the Real Thing. When he told me about the long-distance girlfriend he planned to marry, I dismissed the possibility out of hand. To my mind there was no way that a boy who reads Hegel on Saturdays and looks at me in that melting way under the streetlamp on an October night while the red leaves are falling was going to marry another woman. That would be preposterous. I knew, I knew, that if I wanted hard enough and waited long enough, I would win my heart’s desire. Years later, when it finally broke through my thick haze of denial that the boy was indeed going to do what he had said he would do all along, I was utterly bewildered. How can it be that my aching longing would go unfulfilled? What kind of world is it that I can grasp so far and so long and be left with empty hands?
Humans are desiring creatures. We were created for fulfillment, and we grieve that in this life we can never have everything we want. This ongoing existential crisis is a preoccupation in literature and life. In this month’s column we will wrestle with the problems and paradoxes of the desiring soul through two desire-driven characters: Iron Man from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Shakespeare’s eponymous Macbeth.
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