Berserker wrote:One of the most profound comments on immortality is quoted from Shadow of the Vampire:
"Dracula hasn't had servants in 400 years and then a man comes to his ancestral home, and he must convince him that he... that he is like the man. He has to feed him, when he himself hasn't eaten food in centuries. Can he even remember how to buy bread? How to select cheese and wine? And then he remembers the rest of it. How to prepare a meal, how to make a bed. He remembers his first glory, his armies, his retainers, and what he is reduced to. The loneliest part of the book comes... when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table."
I could see this as a dragon's loneliness. Not that he outlives everyone he loves, but that he outlives life itself, that he is too powerful for life itself.
Good point. Though if you think about it, a better question might have been "Do they still buy bread or select cheese and wine that way I used to?"
The most depressing and most frustrating thing I ever had to do in my entire life was coach my mother through the process of transitioning my mother off of an
IBM 5150 and onto my 2004 Toshiba laptop with Windows XP. Five years later, the only progress she's really shown is that she no longer asks me "one click or two" ten times a minute. She still gets frustrated by even the slightest glitches or problems, has
zero personal problem-solving skills (one time she complained to me that it wouldn't connect -- she forgot to turn the tower on, another time she said "this thing popped up" -- it was the right-click menu), and has an uncanny talent for screwing with my settings without noticing that she's doing it.
I can't imagine what it'd be like to coach somebody that had never seen
any kind of computer in their entire life before.