— Anonymous
Quoting back myself from the first readers respond, my definition of a great work is one that survives the test of time, has to engage readers around the world and not just in the geographic area were it comes from, and has to be complete. This work fulfills my criteria of being a great work. First, it survived the test of time. A couple of months ago I did a project/presentation on Snapchat, as one sample of social media platforms that has the most filters and features of transforming ones image, or the way they see themselves and had a huge impact in society. Snapchat and other alike platforms are creating a whole generation of individuals with (in my opinion) Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), which is a distinct mental disorder in which a person is preoccupied with an imagined physical defect or a minor defect that others often cannot see or over obsessed with their looks. In other words, a generation full of Narcissus. Ovid wrote this great work thousands of years ago, he broke taboos and gave the society something that was unheard of, something exceptional not only for the time and society he lived in but for thousands of years after. The theme was never more coherent than it is in the present days. The language might be a little tough for me to absorb but the theme connects. This makes me wonder, 2000 years since Ovid wrote this, 2000 years of human evolution, but, have we changed much?! We have created all these tools to help us connect with one-other and yet we use these tools to isolate ourselves. We use these tools to create our and live in our own little wolds, with ourselves as the epicenter of it, and we are failing to see outside our own mirror, we are failing to connect with our surrounding. We are alive, but we are not living. The fact that this work survived time, and is still coherent to us makes it a great work. Second, the work connects to different cultures and societies around the globe, they all suffer from the Narcissus symptom. Third, the work is complete. This makes the reading and the analyzing of it much more interesting, because we can draw conclusions on what the author actually said and we do not have to speculate on what we think he meant or said because fragments of the work are missing or lost in translation. Definitely, more enjoyable reading than Gilgamesh.
