What courage it took for the starving and the poor to continue the mere act of existence, of survival, of endurance. Such quiet acts of heroism were not celebrated, and yet they made up the foundation of civilization, far more than all the honorable sentiments of the Ano sages and the pretty words of the nobles.
The vast majority of the people who have ever lived on this planet have left no monuments, no story or song, not even a name to remember them by. I think this will be true of most of us living today and most of those who’ll come after us.
But that doesn’t mean that they and we haven’t lived or will live lives worthy of celebration and remembrance. We forget how hard it is just to get though the day, to go on in the face of the existential abyss, to have children knowing that we’ll die, to keep on hoping when everything seems hopeless, to work in the face of relentless entropy, to build in the shadow of decline and corruption, to love and care when the voices of hate are so deafening. Generations of our ancestors suffered at the whims of the powerful but also laughed in their faces; they loved and schemed and invented and stole and dreamed and struggled—but they survived, and that is how you and I came to be: merely by existing, we’re triumphs.
Dara is too grand for me to be able to tell the story of everyone in it. But I’d like to think that each of you, by imagining how you would live in a place like Dara, brings yet anther soul to life in that world.
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