The making of a vampire in Anne Rice's mythic lore is one of my favorite deviations. In almost all vampire tales, all it takes for a person to be transformed into a vampire is to be bitten. In a math book for kids, this was used to disprove the existence of vampires, because if Dracula needed to drink every night, and all his victims rise from the grave every night, then pretty soon all people in the world will be vampires.
Anne Rice tells us different. The vampire has to drain his victim almost to the point of death. The victim must refuse to succumb to death by all means, by focusing on their will to live, almost akin to meditation. Then the vampire wounds himself and lets his victim drink his blood (mixed with the victim's), and thereby, if all things go right, the person rises up a vampire, a new fledgling.
Gruesome? Definitely. Makes my stomach turn each time I read it.
Aside from which, Rice also says to destroy a vampire you'll need a strong fire, or expose him to sunlight. Garlic, stake through the heart, crucifixes don't work.
When Louis became a vampire he saw the world as never before. Vampire eyes are keener, more acute than human eyes.
Now, I am thirty-three years old, and though my eyesight is not twenty-twenty, I can still choose to really see and really look. Not to take things for granted anymore. Indirectly I learn this from Louis. I don't need vampire eyes to see extraordinarily. I just need to really look, and not take things for granted in this world. And not just seeing, but hearing deeply, listening intently.
Louis said, "I simply regret I was not more attentive to this process." Let us not have that regret, too, at the end of our lives. Let us learn to pay attention.
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