Lestat's Lesson #6

Lesson #6

“I never really envision the finish of anything that I start. It’s risk that fascinates, the moment of infinite possibility. It lures me through eternity when all other charms fail.”

OR

Carpe Diem! (at least if you’re immortal)

You know the saying “Carpe Diem”, seize the day? It’s meant, I think, to tell us to live every day as if it’s our last, because after all, we never really know how many days we have left.

However, it’s difficult to imagine “infinite possibilities” if you’ve only got a finite number of days in which to do them.

It’s hard to be a risk-taker when you know you’re vulnerable. That’s certainly part of the human fascination with vampires, the invulnerability aspect, the “limitless” power (or at the very least a hell of a lot more power than you’d have as a human).

Lestat, I think it can be agreed, is the consummate risk-taker; he simply doesn’t care about nor consider the consequences when he does something.

His desire for taking risks is obviously tied directly into the fact that he’s so indestructible, or his thirst for life.

As humans we complain about boredom incessantly, but imagine what it must be like for someone who can live forever. Sure, you might think on the surface that boredom for an immortal is non-existant because they literally have the time to do anything and everything they want.

If that’s true, then there would certainly come a time when you’ve felt like you’ve seen and done it all. Then comes the ennui, the boredom.
What then? Into the fire or the sun? For someone unlike Lestat, probably. For Lestat though, I think it’s almost impossible for him to become bored. He’s addicted to risk, as it were, like he says, it’s what keeps him going.

He does a lot of silly things which deliberately place himself in danger because in so doing he’s creating possibilities for himself; he’s truly mapping out his own life. Sure, he does things because of the possibilities (look at what happened with Claudia), but he never appears to think in the sense that if he doesn’t do something it’ll lead to something bad for himself; it’s purely the desire to see what’s going to happen.

In short, Lestat acts because of possibilities, but never because of consequences. I think his ability to constantly endure whatever life throws at him is owed to the fact that he knows enough to not hold stock in the future.

He is never really concerned about the long term. Maybe that’s because in being immortal, there really is no long term (time is somewhat irrelevant), but I think that’s owed mostly to Lestat’s personality; he just simply doesn’t care.

Lestat, even though he’s got forever stretching before him, lives purely in the now. Life is all about possibilities, endless possibilities, and one can’t focus on the possibilities if one keeps thinking “what will happen if?”

That’s why you can’t envision the finish of anything you start, like Lestat says; that can be positively crippling, in a way.

Envisioning an end to things just places a limit on what you can do, it tells you right off that there is an end. You start thinking like that and you’re just setting yourself up to run smack into a wall.

Lestat’s survived for so long, and will continue to endure, largely out of his ability to create situations, and to always find something new.

It all goes back to the carefree aspect of his personality.

The crux of Lestat’s statement is this:

Live every day like you’ve got forever, even if you don’t. Life is about living it now, not living it ten years from now. Assuming you’re a human reading this, it might seem a little difficult to take risks when you know the consequences.

I’m not telling you to do anything stupid, and I don’t think Lestat is either. As humans I think we have to use our better judgement because we just can’t do all the things that vampires can.

That doesn’t mean we can’t apply what Lestat’s saying to our lives…we just need to adjust it a bit. Because we’re human and thus physically limited, there have to be some boundries.

Outside of that though, limits don’t have to exist unless you place them there. In other words, don’t jump out of a plane without a parachute because you’re not worried about the consequences, but in the same line of thought, don’t be afraid to ask someone out because you’re afraid of being embarassed.