Category Archives: Immortality

Kane Williamson. (Photo Source: Getty Images)

Kane Williamson was unbeaten on 199, when a rain break forced the players off the field. But then, the man is the epitome of calmness, and the Kiwi skipper walked back to the dressing room, with no anxiety on his face. After the rain break, the right-hander nonchalantly flicked Shaheen Afridi past mid-wicket to bring up the fourth double century of his career.

There were no celebrations from the man after the landmark, just a raise of his willow to acknowledge the rousing ovation that he received from the crowd. Such was the grace and poise the Kiwi skipper displayed out in the middle that a true connoisseur of Test cricket would have admired his classic knock, irrespective of nationality.

In his marathon stay that lasted 364 deliveries, Williamson scored 238 glorious runs, including 28 delightful boundaries all across the ground. His innings came to an end when he hit Faheem Ashraf straight to Shan Masood at third-man, who for a change held on to the offering.

In the first session of the day, Henry Nicholls and Williamson continued to make life difficult for the Pakistan bowlers. In the pre-lunch session, the left-right duo added 114 runs off 28 overs, scoring their runs at a rate of 4.07 runs per over. The left-handed Nicholls brought up the 7th Test century of his career with a majestic drive past cover.

The Pakistanis finally made the breakthrough in the 120th over of the innings when they managed to scalp Nicholls and ended a mammoth 369-run partnership between the two men. To a short delivery from Mohammad Abbas, the left-hander went for the pull, but he hit it straight down the throat of Naseem Shah at fine leg. BJ Watling was the next man to depart, edging Shaheen Afridi to Haris Sohail in the slip cordon.

Williamson also went past a very significant milestone during the course of the day as he breached the 7000-run barrier in Tests and became the third Kiwi batsman to do so. Williamson also became the fastest New Zealand batsman to 7000 Test runs, reaching there in just 144 innings. The Black Caps skipper is just 264 runs away from becoming the all-time leading run-scorer for New Zealand in Test cricket. The batting Superstar also equaled Brendon McCullum in the all-time list of batsmen with the most double centuries for the Kiwis.

Apart from Williamsons double hundred, the other bright spot of the day was Daryl Mitchells maiden Test century. The right-hander pummeled 8 fours and 2 sixes and scored 102 off just 112 balls, at a strike rate of 91.07. New Zealand declared their first innings with the scorecard reading 659/6, with the last 4.5 overs fetching 60 runs for them.

In reply, Pakistan ended the Day at 8/1, with Kyle Jamieson removing Shan Masood. The left-hander recorded his second duck of the match, as he departed after edging Kyle Jamieson to the slip cordon. Masood has endured a horrible series against New Zealand, aggregating just 10 runs in the four innings that he has played, scoring three ducks.

New Zealand will be looking to wrap things up on Day 4.

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Twitter Reactions: Kane Williamsons 667 minutes of masterclass rubs salt in Pakistans wounds - CricTracker

by Victor Chan

SPOILERS FOR SOUL AHEAD: PROCEED WITH CAUTION

Dumbledore once described music as a magic beyond all we do here (SS 128), a statement that Joe Gardner, the protagonist of Pixars Soul, would agree with. Indeed, Id like to believe that the magic of music is studied at the Department of Mysteries. Harry Potter and Soul both explore abstract concepts such as being in the zone, along with death and the meaning of life through a humanist approach. In Soul, characters search for their purposes in life, and although Harry was the Chosen One, he still had the agency to choose his life path. Here are three things that Harry Potter and Soul can teach us about the meaning of life.

At the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry is presented with two choices: go back or go on. Likewise, at the end of Soul, Joe is given another chance at life. Both character-defining moments occur in the heads of Harry and Joe. In Soul, 22 describes the Great Before as an illusion and hypothetical. In Deathly Hallows, when Harry asks Dumbledore where he thinks they are, Dumbledore replies, This is, as they say, your party (DH 712).

At the core of both Harry Potter and Soul is the idea that it is our choices that show what we truly are. The circumstances that we are placed in define us less than how we respond to being placed in those circumstances. In Harry Potter, Hogwarts students are Sorted into Houses based on their personalities and values. Soul explores the concept of a beforelife where souls are readied for life on Earth. One particular scene early on shows souls being assigned personalities, seemingly arbitrary. Joe asks, This is where personalities come from? to which another character replies, Do you think people are just born with them?

However, even though Hogwarts students are Sorted into Houses and souls are assigned personalities, Harry Potter and Soul reject determinism. In fact, in the Great Before, souls need to find their own spark.

In Harry Potter and Soul, characters grapple with the fear of the unknown. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore tells Harry that it is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness (HBP 566). In Soul, 22 has a cynical attitude toward what they think living on Earth will be like. In Harry Potter, Voldemort fears what Dumbledore describes as the next great adventure (SS 297). When Joe finds himself on the way to the Great Beyond at the start of Soul, he runs away from the light. Later in Soul, Joe says, Im just afraid that if I died today, then my life would have amounted to nothing.

Fear of the unknown holds people back from chasing that spark that makes life worth living. In Soul, we see an unnamed character with a stable, well-paying job in finance who is unhappy with their life but scared to make a career change.

Dumbledore believes that even though people fear the unknown in death, thats what makes it the next great adventure. This is shown in 22s character arc in Soul. When we first meet 22, they do not want to leave the Great Before to begin life on Earth. However, after they accidentally get sent to Earth and experience simple joys such as tasting pizza, feeling the wind blow, and catching a falling leaf in the palm of their hand, they do not want to return to the Great Before.

In Soul, when Joe tells his mother that music is all he thinks about, she says, You cant eat dreams for breakfast. Joes mother wants him to be realistic and settle on a career. This interaction transported me to Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone when we are introduced to the Mirror of Erised. According to Dumbledore, the Mirror shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts, and men have wasted away before itnot knowing if what it shows is real or even possible (SS 213). Dumbledore tells Harry not to dwell on dreams and forget to live (SS 214).

This idea of forgetting to live is explored in Soul. In the Great Before, lost souls are souls belonging to people who are disconnected from life because they cannot let go of their obsessions. Those souls are stuck in a state of limbo. In Deathly Hallows, a fragment of Voldemorts soul becomes stuck in limbo at Kings Cross. He was so obsessed with killing Harry that he never considered the possibility of Lily invoking an ancient form of magic, and he was so obsessed with immortality that he never considered that splitting ones soul could cause eternal pain and suffering in the afterlife. In Half-Blood Prince, a conversation between Voldemort and Dumbledore takes place where Voldemort says, Nothing I have seen in the world has supported your famous pronouncements that love is more powerful than my kind of magic, Dumbledore (HBP 444). In truth, Voldemort never searched for the power of magic based on love because he was obsessed with using the Dark Arts to gain power and immortality.

In Sorcerers Stone, Dumbledore tells Harry that people have wasted away before the Mirror of Erised, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible. When Joe finally gets his big break as a musician, he has an existential crisis. He had been dreaming of this moment his entire life, but when the moment finally arrived, it was underwhelming because he didnt feel any different. During a pivotal scene in the film, Joe realizes that its the little moments of joy that make life worth living, even if they may seem infinitesimal in comparison to the bigger picture at the time.

In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore says that Voldemort was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole (HBP 511). Although Joes dream of a career in jazz is not as extreme as Voldemorts quest for immortality, both Harry Potter and Soul convey the importance of living in the moment and not developing tunnel vision.

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The Meaning of Life According to Harry Potter and Soul - MuggleNet

As powerful as many of DC's heroes and villains are, they pale in comparison to the literal gods and goddesses that exist in that multiverse.

The DC landscape is filled with characters that absolutely boggle the mind in terms of unfathomable power. From heavy hitters such asThe Man of Steel, The Flash, and Shazam, these "terrestrial" heroes, for lack of a better term, pale in comparison to some of the entities that are capable of flipping these heroes worlds upside down.

RELATED:Flash: The 10 Most Powerful Villains Of The Fastest Man Alive

From reality warping to time-travel, these cosmic-level beings can, and in some instances, have made reality their will, bringing in the question of whether The Presence is obsolete in his position of DC's Supreme Being.

Superboy-Prime is an unfathomable force to be reckoned with that has thrashed both DC heroes and villains alike. Following the obliteration of his home universe in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Superboy-Prime would return from the Paradise Dimension alongside Alexander Luthor with a twisted scope of what he saw as a failing superhero landscape.

Believing the Post-Crisis heroes to be feigning heroism instead of upholding his idea of altruistic heroism, Super-Boy tumbled down the villainous rabbit hole, becoming the very thing he resented. Debatably the most powerful incarnation of Superman due to a lack of weakness to green kryptonite, Superboy-Prime has shattered dimensional barriers with sheer strength; subdued the JSA, Teen Titans, and Doom Patrol all at the same time; escaped the Speed Force; and was even held in a guarded quantum containment field after dispatching almost the entirety of the Green Lantern Corps.

Known as the First Lantern, Volthoom became the first being to harness the power of the Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum, making him the most powerful ring bearer amongst all other Lanterns. Searching for a remedy to his now-dead homeworld, Volthoom used a device capable of multiversal space/time travel called the Travel Lantern to venture into the multiverse.

Coming across the Maltusians in the main DC universe, Volthoom would aid the ancient aliens in bearing their experimental power battery in exchange for being able to take it back to his universe. However, upon being exposed to the infinite power the spectrum wields, Volthoom's psyche shatters, turning him against the Maltusians and killing hundreds of them. His constructs are physical manifestations as opposed to light constructs, lending credence to the idea that reality-warping is well within his abilities, not to mention being nigh-immortal.

Father to the Raven of the Teen Titans, Trigon is the quasi-manifestation of evil and hatred in the DC universe whose existence stretches back before the Big Bang. While his "demonic" appearance gives the idea of him being some variety of a Hell Lord, he is, in fact, a decedent of an ancient celestial alien race called The Divine.

This race would summon the evils of a hundred galaxies called the Heart of Darkness to cleanse Trigons' corrupted soul but Trigon, in turn, wouldabsorb the energy, elevating his cosmic power and slaying The Divine. Capable of a myriad of abilities ranging from molecular reconstruction, immortality, and metamorphosis, Trigon also swindles women from other worlds into bearing his children, spreading his evil across countless universes.

Hailing from the 5th Dimension, a dimension where the laws of physics are none existent, Mr. Mxyzpltk is an imp who has been a prankster to the Man of Steel for nearly 80 years. Originally a jesterin the 5th Dimension, Mxy uses his reality-warping abilities to jovial lengths to annoy Superman until he is undoubtedly sent back to his dimension once Superman gets him to say his name backward.

RELATED:Superman: 9 Amazing Mr. Mxyzptlk Cosplay That Look Almost Just Like The Comic

Despite this nuanced caveat, he can travel through space/time and dimensional barriers; break the fourth wall; is immortal and completely self-sufficient; and theoretically can do anything his imagination wills such as increasing his size and defeating the Spectre by cracking the earth over his head.

The Anti-Monitor is the OG cosmic menace that was the main antagonist in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Having multiple retcons to his origin, his most recent one revealed he is the offspring of an ultra-cosmic being called Perpetua, who along with his brothers, the Monitor, and the Forger of Worlds, were in charge of creating, examining, and destroying multiverses.

Hell-bent on destroying all things in existence, his vast reality warping capabilities have seen large contingents ofDC superheroes face-off against him and fail. He can wipe out entire universes, distribute portions of his Anti-Matter power to other beings, and even wield the anti-life equation to dominate the wills of those he chooses. It is said that if he "dies," he is reborn in the 6th Dimension, the highest plane of existence that exists beyond time and imagination.

The Spectre is the physical embodimentof Gods' vengeance in the DC universe. Having multiple hosts over the character's tenure, the Spectre rejected the notion of mercy and in turn, was made to bond itself to a human soul in hopes that it would mitigate the wrath of God.

Originally an angel named Aztar who sided with Lucifer during his rebellion, Aztar would come to repent for his violation and as punishment was made to be the embodiment of God's judgment. Having faced off with immensely powerful characters including the Anti-Monitor and Parallax, the Spectre derives its power from The Presence, the end-all-be-all creator in DC comics, making him nigh-omniscient and nigh-omnipotent.Even when "killed" he can reconstitute himself, effectively making him immortal.

Originally from theWatchmenseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Doctor Manhattan and the rest of the Watchmen began strategically segueing into the DC Universe at the start of DC Rebirth in 2016. When Nuclear physicist Jon Osterman is ensnared in an intrinsic field subtractor,a machine that utilizes radiation to remove "intrinsic" fields from solid objects, he reconstitutes himself as a godly being who can perceive all space/time, at the same time, relative to his life personally.

Now a quantum being with unlimited power, Manhattan can telekinetically control subatomic matter making his capabilities unfathomably grand in scope. From limited time-travel,size-alteration, and immortality tobeing able to create life and alternate universes, Doctor Manhattan is truly acosmic being that is in a category of his own.

Lucifer was originally an Archangel named Samael whose existence extended back well before the creation of the DC universe. Rebelling against his father, The Presence, at the dawn of time, Lucifer's war against Heaven would result in him being cast into a void dubbed The Chaoplasm which would transform into a desolate and barren region known as Hell.

RELATED:Doctor Manhattan Vs. Lucifer Morningstar: Who Wins In A Fight?

Awaiting the day to be freed, Lucifer's frustration of a deceitful pre-destination being intrinsically tied to him overrides his positionand he releases the souls of Hell and retires to Earth, leaving Dream of The Endless to watch over the bleak dimension. From nigh-omniscience, chronokinesis, and reality alteration, Lucifercan manipulate any external force to the extent he desires, making him one of DC'smost powerful characters.

Crisis on Infinite Earths had the Anti-Monitor.Zero Hour had Parallax.Infinite Crisis had Superboy-Prime. Every "crisis-event" in DC served as either a character rework or line-wide, hard reboot, each withan antagonist giving the heroes, and sometimes villains, a rude awakening in how inept they were against their vast abilities.

Now, what if there was a cosmic menace so grandiose they were actually the puppetmaster, pulling the strings on these crisis-events to obtain complete and total control of the Multiverse? Well, that would be Perpetua. Hailing from the 6th Dimension, Perpetua is a Super Celestial who wastasked by the Judges of the Source to create new life within the Omniverse, however, desired to eliminate the judges instead. Now free of her captivity after being imprisoned, Perpetua is on a quest to destroy and recreate the Multiverse as the ultimate, end-all-be-all DC enemy.

Where Marvel has The One Above All, and Image Comics has Mother, DC's omnipotent creator of all things is known as The Presence. Only making a handful of nuanced appearances, The Presence is the Source of Creation, birthing the vast cosmic energies that inhabit the multiverse. His power, like his counterparts, extend beyond the multiverse and into the Omniverse. Anincorporeal entity whose power is the source of every other power or energy, The Presence is one of a kind among DC characters.

NEXT:10 Superheroes Who Have Beaten A God

Next 5 Characters Spider-Man Lost To But Shouldn't Have (& 5 He Beat But Shouldn't Have)

Trevon Gibbs is a 22 year old entertainer living in California with a keen interest in all things involving the overall medium of superhero epics. Trevons journey as a writer is in its beginning stages, but its one hes excited to be embarking on, and bring his eye and imagination of comic book superheroes, to you.

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10 Strongest Gods In The DC Pantheon | CBR - CBR - Comic Book Resources

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue has been causing quite a stir in the book community and for good reason.

This beautiful book totally enchanted me and I ended up reading it two times in one month because it was just that good.

I initially picked up this book as the early reviews were raving and the premise of a romance including a character of the literal devil was intriguing.

But this novel blew my already high expectations out of the water.

V.E.Schwab wrote an epic tale of romance with a fast plot which kept me on my toes the whole time.

Addie LaRue makes a deal with the devil but not all is what it seems as instead of immortality he makes her invisible, figuratively.

She can live forever but any person that she meets will forget her as soon as she is out of their eyesight.

Leading to a rather miserable existence for the main character.

The novel follows Addie from the 18th century to present day and how she finds ways to leave a mark on the world despite the devil's curse.

This book brought about a few existential crises in myself as it forces you to ponder your own impact and what you would do differently if you never aged.

The biggest pleasure of this book was the unravelling of Addies past as she travels the world and slowly grows into herself.

Schwab doesnt give you all of this information in one go.

She slowly drip feeds you the secrets of Addies past which constantly surprise me.

By the end of this book I was an emotional wreck, Schwab tears out the reader's heart several times and I loved it.

If like me the never ending pandemic is extending your singledom then I would highly recommend this novel to fill that romance hole.

If you want to hear more of my book thoughts you can follow me on Instagram @lauraandrew95

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Book review: V.E. Schwab writes a book to leave you weeping and heartbroken - Sheffield Telegraph

The year 2020 will go down in history as the annus horribilis for the human race; the year that millions of lives were forfeited to a tiny and inanimate virus with no sensate hope or ambition. Yet, the coronavirus has decimated millions, and left many millions more cowering in our helplessness. This is one terrible year when most humans, for whom death is often a distant thought, came face to face with the possibility of a sudden demise from a COVID-19 ambush. 2020 has been the very definition of uncertainty for everyone, from the mighty to the lowly. We all got sucked into the vortex palpable fearno one knew when the virus will strike, where it could be contracted, or how fatal it could be. COVID-19 became the most lethal of all the enemies humans have ever contended with. And it fueled our uncertainty in the very fact that we had no certain fact about its character and modus operandi.

As the usual tradition goes with the coming of a new year, we all welcomed 2020 with hope and resolutions. Governments made budgets, humans made plans, organizations made projections. The year was to be the usual in the trajectory of human activities and busyness. Children will be born, and adult will grow old and die. There will be achievements all around the world, and calamities too. The usual diseases will keep ravaging humanity, from cancer to tuberculosis. All the states of the world would battle their normal internal crises and predicament, and few resolutions would be made. And yet, we all neglected what had been on humanitys radar since humanity began its civilizational march many centuries ago; the very underbelly of humans desire to transcend themselves.

COVID-19 brought humanity very low. It humbled us at the very height of our civilizational achievements. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher, once perceptively remarked: The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. Since the Stone Age, and then the Industrial Revolution, humanity has grown beyond its cradle which is the earth. We not only concretized the fragility of the earth; we also have turned our attention to the space. Humanity has arrived at what Mark Twain called the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities. This validates the Yoruba adage that when humans have eaten and are surfeited, they then look for unnecessary distractions.

After civilization had settled the issue of survival, it was then time for humans to transcend themselves, especially through the discoveries of science and technology and its limitless possibilities and dangers in ways that are often indistinguishable. When humans cracked the secret of the atom, we arrived at the nuclear reactor as well as the nuclear atomic bomb. We now contemplate a posthuman world with the breakthrough with artificial intelligence.

In its very essence, civilization commenced as humanitys search for survival. It has now been transformed into an exploration of our possible immortality. To be human is not only to be mortal, but to also have the capacity to perceive the infinite, which we do not see in our finitude. Humanity is trapped in the yearning for infinitude; the desire to undermine our mortality and live forever. Abraham Lincoln puts it better: Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality. And so, once the first land was tilled and farmed, agriculture enabled humans to conquer starvation. But it also enabled an abundance that helped us to keep staving off death. With medicine, humans started to invade the genetic code to hold off the principle of ageing encoded into our being. We started battling diseases and sicknesses, and also death. Immortality therefore lies in the achievement of civilization for humanity. We have to keep overreaching ourselves in other to be able to overreach our mortality.

Unfortunately, civilization is what makes you sick, says Paul Gauguin, the French post-impressionist artist. But more than this, civilization already puts in stock the pointer to what will eradicate humanitythe nuclear threat, and the virus. Since the combined effort of humanitys brilliant scientists unlocked the secret of the atom, the human race has remained on the precipice of self-destruction. When Hiroshima and Nagasaki snowballed into the atomic mushroom, we saw in that catastrophe, the possibility of undermining our own race for immortality. That is the paradox of civilization: it contained the seed for our immortality and our destruction in unequal proportion. In other words, we are more likely to be destroyed than to achieve immortality. If humanity is destroyed, then there will be no one left to remember us. This is where the insight of Emerson leads usthe civilization we have invented to ensure our immortality is what will most likely kill and efface us and all the infinitude we ever hoped for.

The reality of our accelerated mortality came alive in 2020. Nature rebelled against the unmitigated assault on her sanctity and exploitation. A family of the coronaviruses jumped its boundary and landed in the civilized space of humanity. And we were not prepared because we have always underestimated the virus. After all, we seem to have got the structure of most of the viruses we know and their epidemiological features. The common cold is one of the most dangerous ailment afflicting humanity, but we seem to have tamed it. What can we not tame? Yet, we have arrived at the limit of human hubris. And it is neither yet from aliens in outer spaces nor from artificial intelligence. It is from a lowly virus that is inorganic and inanimate. There is less we know about the virus and its behavior than we really know. The novelty of the coronavirus effectively undermines the accumulated scientific knowledge about its type that we have stockpiled for decades.

Mercifully, 2020 has also become the year in which humanity has managed to get an understanding of the vaccination that will stop the virus in its deadly track. Of course, human beings have the resilience to always overcome whatever adversity is brought on them either naturally or by their own efforts. But then, humanity has brought itself too many times to the precipice of destruction not to take notice of the dangerous side of our existence and the search for immortality. Essentially, it is human hubris that brought the pandemic of 2020 upon us. It is our inability to take stock of our civilizational progress and how far we are willing to go to transcend our humanity. It is certain that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, for instance, and all the others almost ready for us will provide instant relief from the scourge of the COVID-19. But should the fact of the vaccines, or human resilience in the face of troubles, blind us to how far-fetched our search for immortality is, or how dangerous?

Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician, has a piece of wisdom we can draw on: A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses. What insight do we need to urgently derive from this pandemic, and from others that have afflicted humankind? What deep lessons does COVID-19 teach us in 2020? It is simple: there is a need to de-escalate humanitys rush for self-destruction. If this family of coronavirus could make the fatal jump into the human host, there are so many more that can. Thus, the arrival of the breakthrough in vaccination against the coronavirus ought not be interpreted as the resumption of our human normality or the onslaught against nature. On the contrary, it ought to be a time to pause and reassess what it means to be human, and what civilization ought to mean.

And more than this, we need a redefinition of what it means to be immortal. Humans can only be immortal in the face of posterity and the state in which we leave the world. Posterity is our immortality. Unfortunately, the logic of civilization is often oriented towards a further exploitation of the universe with scant thought for what future generations will make of the progress we have achieved, and the failures we leave behind. It ought to be clear to humanity now that civilization is amok.

From the First to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, humans are barely managing the benefits of progress since we are ever confronted with the threat of imploding the world as we know it. 2020 and the pandemic make it very clear to us that we are nearer destruction, and the undermining of our own immortality, that we imagine. The COVID-19, uncontained, has the capacity to kill the whole of humanity. And we have barely even managed to get it arrested. And who knows what the future of more scientific and technological breakthrough holds? The coronavirus is insisting on the imperatives of weighing human progress on the scale of morality. Civilizational progress is not an unconditional good. It needs to be tempered by further thought on how our immortality can be retained in the womb of the future of those yet unborn.

Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Retired Federal Permanent Secretary & Directing Staff, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos, tolaopa2003@gmail.com, tolaopa@isgpp.com.ng.

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2020, COVID-19 and Reflection on Human Immortality Tunji Olaopa - THISDAY Newspapers