Innocence and Experience:A Comparative Tale

I know you expected a comic, but I believe you will be pleased with the creativity I put into this… I hope this still

achieves the goals of the assignment. I apologize in advance for sketchiness. :P

By Steven Fuentes

This is innocence. His life consists of fleeting whims and desires, he is ruled by emotion and instinct. To him, everything is new; from everything he can learn more.

This is Experience. The only semblance of his former life left are the mementos left in his office. Photos of a family he’s forgotten and random articles from the people he’s left behind in his ascent. His accolades, however plentiful, mean nothing but the paper and the words written. He has replaced emotions with logic and its cold and calculating reasoning.

Innocence admires nature, (among a multitude of other things) with it’s unchanging methods and patterns; It has survived and propagated itself for millennia.

Experience admires only those who have climbed above him, and has no thought of those below him, save their purposes in respect to making him more and more important. He demands, however to be admired by those below him. (Logically, he expects it.)

From the perspective of Innocence, ephemeral means something which must be cherished each moment. He appreciates each moment and every thing equally, so to him, the word has no meaning.

Everything is ephemeral to Experience. All the things he has seen and done have been done before, and each is more meaningless than the last. Each fleeting moment of gratitude or satisfaction he feels is gone as rapidly as it came.

Innocence has tamed his puppy. They each work to help one another; each has softened the other’s heart.

Experience has tamed his subordinates. Thinking is disallowed without the proper forms, which are to be submitted in triplicate. (An even then, it is only permitted for brief periods of time.) They will become mindless drones, and work to benefit no one at all. (To Tame these people makes experience the tiniest bit happy, if that emotion still exists for him.)*

* Though I don’t believe it does.

Innocence and his puppy have a rite. Every full moon, they go out to look at the constellations (and the moon of course), and the puppy, whose name, incidentally, is Ralf, bays at the moon.

Layoffs are a rite which Experience participates in each quarter. He enjoys “cutting the slack” and removing those employees which slow production (they are timed by the second, and the computer spits out the lowest numbers, you see). He prefers to do it personally.

* This is the second emotion I have used, but I will have to explain the context. To Experience, it is logical to remove that which is unnecessary, so he enjoys that he is adhering to logic so precisely.

END