A human-like contraption, the chair is pretty close in shape to the human body, precisely so that it can accommodate it with ease and comfort, while also, perhaps, immobilizing it. Icarus chose differently. He lifted up the chair, leading it into adventure, taking it as far as the sun…
Should there be a debate as to whether Icarus should or shouldn’t have flown so high? Evidently that was his free will. Why, then, is this act of his so damnable and why, century after century, has it been portrayed as the fatal result of frivolous youth, a side-effect of an impulsive disposition? What if the legacy of our ancestors is questioned for a moment with respect to this particular myth and we assume for once that Icarus hesitated briefly before his dilemma?
Perhaps the magic of the journey filled him with an unprecedented sense of meaning, giving him a genuine motive to conquer the skies. Perhaps he loved the journey more than the original destination. He questioned the end result and reversed his route. Yet again, what if we remain faithful to the myth and take Icarus’s act to be naïve? Celestial serenity could have led to his spiritual awakening, providing the bridge of his reconnection to the divine; like the divine sensation experienced through the instinctive purity and beauty of a silent infant child, before time absorbs the intellect, putting forth the clamour and bubble of the mind. This version of the mind contradicts the so-called human prudence, but perhaps it makes of Icarus’s union with the Light, the transformation of his actions and their transubstantiation in the universe, a matter of conscious or unconscious choice.
Icarus’s journey cannot, therefore, be interpreted merely as a tragic moment of childish impulsiveness. It has earned the right to be interpreted perhaps as a moment of reconciliation with fear, a moment in which the child unfolds his ability to face and accept the unknown, without limitations or filters, a great moment of the joyful comeback to the truth. Indeed, isn’t the light of the sun an absolute truth? Isn’t the light the very womb from which man is born, always seeks and inevitably returns to?”
