Imagination and Meaning

Imagination is the tool to dream.  It may be the source of great joy, or the source of great despair and sorrow.  It may grant an individual escape from undesired ills, or suffer the victim to the edge of sanity.  To imagine inanimate objects as profound beings as the case in The Handsomest Drowned Man. The giant drowned man was a prop used for the village people’s imagination. Like a toy car for a child, the drowned man was a toy the people imagined whole stories about, and make believe scenarios, and even a name.  Despite the drowned handsome man not speaking or interacting with the characters at all, they conceived such details about his life that made him a hero amongst the village.  

In the Twilight Zone episode of The Lonely, the main character is deserted on an asteroid millions of miles from the earth by his lonesome.  To aid him with his bitter loneliness, he was given a robotic woman who can feel, sense, reason, and capable of other human abilities.  Despite being a mechanical system, the robot looked identical to a human woman.  Quary, the main character, was immediately was cruel towards the replica, but as the robot began to cry he was suddenly moved by the tears.  He soon welcomed the machine, and viewed her as a genuine human being.  If one was unaware of the mechanical parts working beneath the flesh like exterior it would be almost impossible to detect its robotic nature.  The main distinctions between a human and the robot lie in the imagination, and the spirit that is uniquely human.  Albeit the mechanical woman could reason, calculate, sense, and feel, it lacked the human capabilities to believe and to imagine.  To be able to pretend and make believe are exclusive to Quary and other humans, not included in the robot.  Also the organic makeup of a human is foreign to that of a machine.  For example, a human being is similar to a cigarette and a robot would be likened to an electric cigarette.  They both serve the same function and one is modeled after the other, but only fire, a natural element of the earth, can ignite the cigarette.  The electric cigarette relies on batteries, a synthetic element, for its energy source.