Sunday, March 29, 2015

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins Blog Post



English Language Arts

Jitterbug Perfume is not your average love story. Neither is it your average adventure tale.

The book, while tugging readers along with Alobar and Kudra through the ages, doesn’t seize life by the throat and demand to understand its meaning, but, quite on the contrary, the book, with the help of its characters and their accomplishments, allows life to approach it, and to inquire for what reason it does what it does.  

Jitterbug Perfume unearths the truth of the art of immortality, and how, as seen with Alobar and Kudra, true immortality is not the essence of longevity, and not of how long one can remain in one’s body, because, as Robbins repeatedly explains, everything living must, eventually, die. In Jitterbug Perfume, the two main characters meet a dying, yes, dying god who, up too his last moments of existence, joins them on their journey. Robbins describes how, as gods are immortal to things that kill those who are mortal, such as disease and bad habits, they’re only alive as long as people believe in them. So, simply put, it is belief and ideals that bring true immortality, not resistance to “death.” Continuing on this thought, through Alobar’s millennia-or-so long life, he realizes that he has accomplished, relatively speaking, nothing of substance, not including beating death at his/her own game (but for what?), while men and women who live to be a mere 60 years old have accomplishments that are as immortal as his body, yet their ideas are recognized for their great feats, while he (to those that have heard his tale) frightens those who are mortal with the unknown. With this, after his millennia of living, Alobar discovers that the true essence of immortality does not lie with the body, but with the mind.

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