Like Tears In Rain book illustration book artwork Duncan Long

The tears in rain scene from Blade Runner is both profound and moving.

The lines themselves aren’t so powerful without the delivery of actor Rutger Hauer – who apparently improvised by adding the “tears in rain” part to his lines (a stroke of genius if ever there was one). His lines in the movie:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.

Beyond being a good example of what acting and science fiction movies should be, this scene taps into a great fear of human existence: Being forgotten after death. It is a theme we hear throughout literature from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when Mark Anthony tells the crowd that the good a man does is often “interred with his bones” to much of Woody Allen’s work which seems geared to the fear of death and becoming lost. As Allen noted, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.”

I have to wonder how many of us in the arts really are at least in part motivated to create in order to say, “I was here. This is a little part of what I was”?

You can see this fear and hope in the “Singularity” (the nerd’s version of the Christian Rapture, some have suggested), life extension, and even NASA’s Engineering and Safety Center Academy which is attempting to preserve the lifetime experiences and knowledge of NASA senior scientists and engineers who are retiring. All have elements of the fear of having one’s experiences lost like tears in rain.

In the end, most of us understand our knowledge, feelings, and hopes will, upon death, be swallowed up and lost. It seems the only relief to this fear is the dark comedy of Woody Allen and others, a hope in an afterlife, and the ability to leave behind small tokens to remind people that we once walked the planet.

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When not agonizing over philosophy and the meaning of creativity, Duncan Long works as a freelance magazine and book illustrator for HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See his book illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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