Okay, so I admit, despite the persistent crushing weight of law school, I do make time for Heroes. I mean, it's super-powered people, I'm a comic book junkie, and Lost has, well, lost it's lustre this season. Heroes is fast-paced, and instead of making everything a persistent mystery, they reveal things and advance the plot, increasing tension not by hiding things, but by revealing them. Definitely the best show running this season.

Now, just so you know this isn't astroturfing for NBC, I mention Heroes for a reason. The episode "Parasite" had a bit of dialogue I'd like to take up for a moment...

Mr. Linderman: "You see I think there comes a time when a man has to ask himself, whether he wants a life of happiness, or a life of meaning."

Nathan Petrelli: "I'd like to have both."

Mr. Linderman: "Can't be done. Two very different paths. To be truly happy, a man must live absolutely in the present. No thought of what's gone before and no thought of what lies ahead. But, a life of meaning, a man is condemned to wallow in the past and obsess about the future."

Isn't that interesting? Perhaps more to the point, do you think it's true? I mean, certainly it is a truism, and (the generally trite and broadly accessible nature of evening television drama notwithstanding) it seems at least intuitively plausible. Certainly it is a variation on the theme of "ignorance is bliss."

There are a lot of ways to approach this; it falls quickly, for example, to existential assertions about meaning versus being and the idea that mere being is not happiness. Hair-splitting over the differences between "pleasure" and "happiness" and "joy," commonly employed in religious discussions of virtue and vice, might also prove effective. But it may profit us to seek, not the myriad ways in which Mr. Linderman is wrong, but the subtle reasons why he is nonetheless so convincing.

I think that Mr. Linderman's words play upon one difficulty of human modernity: our implicit acceptance that a "life of meaning" requires a "life of unique significance." We talk a good game about the significance of parents, of individuals, of friends, of love... but as near as I can tell, no one was ever awarded an honorary degree for being a good friend. I remember reading, some time ago, a news story about a University holding a banquet of honor for the wife of a prominent religious figure. She had lived an exemplary life, to be sure, and accomplished much worth honoring! But she had accomplished nothing that a million--ten million!--others had not also accomplished. "Why," I wondered, "Does the University not have a banquet for my grandmother, as well?"

Of course the answer is simple to the point of being utilitarian. We cannot have banquets for everyone, all the time. And why hold a banquet for someone comparatively few people know, when we can merit press releases and the accompanying boost in institutional donations by honoring someone who already enjoys significant publicity?

We celebrate celebrity. With celerity! It might be argued that the excessive praise heaped upon the unique should not be taken to diminish the common-but-nonetheless-laudatory. It seems logically sound, but what we say is not always how we feel. In Alan Moore's magnum opus, Watchmen, one godlike being harmonizes the dichotomy brilliantly:

Thermo-dynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.

But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... we gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.

Come... dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.

For these (and other) reasons, I consciously strive to be unaffected by celebrity. Unconsciously, too; my all-too-human propensity for awe tends to invest itself in fictional surrogates, which I suppose is an acceptable trade-off. Those fictional surrogates are beings of power; mutants and wizards and larger-than-life idealists, characters on pages and on screens whose stories bespeak the triumph of idealism over exigency. They are greater than their creators as they transcend their most debilitating weakness: that they are, in the end, beautiful lies.

They are heroes.

Mr. Linderman is so convincing because he echoes the deep desire of (probably) every person: to overcome their past and to dominate their future. The impotent despair, finding happiness only in immediacy. We want to be important, but the world around us tells us that important is a much bigger thing than we can ever achieve. Mr. Linderman is convincing because he speaks the doubts of everyone's heart.

I know a man who wants to be a Prophet. He wants God to appear to him and give him a mission. He wants his opinion to matter to everyone who hears it; indeed, he wants his accrued wisdom to be regarded by millions as the Gospel around which they should pattern their existence. He is an excruciatingly unhappy man, despite an enviable life, despite the significant influence he does wield within his sphere. Though I do not think he has ever heard them, Mr. Linderman's words are this man's creed. But he is not unhappy because he has a life of meaning; this man is unhappy because he wants a life of meaning and believes, ultimately, that he does not have it. Because he has accepted someone else's definition of meaning.

Of course, this man could be any of us. Did I not, after all, enter law school hoping to "change the world for the better?" Who among us has not undertaken to prove meaningful? Who among us has endured unhappiness in the hopes that the end would justify the means? For indeed, if the end cannot justify the means, what will?

And now, knowing why Mr. Linderman sounds so convincing, we can see with clarity the error of his words. At first it appeared that he was simply wrong about happiness, but in fact he is wrong about meaning. Meaning--purpose--is not something the world can give you.

It is something you take for yourself.

That is the secret every hero has, deeper than alter-egos, more inscrutable than the source of their powers. What every hero has in common is that the world does not define them, and so they are free to define the world.