Cyrus the Great and the Human Search for Meaning
- Kendra Jade Troschel
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
When I began painting this series, I thought I was painting history.
I thought I was painting Cyrus the Great: a ruler, an empire, a civilization that helped shape the ancient world.
But as the work developed, I found myself returning to a different question entirely.
What does it mean to be human in the face of time?
Human life is remarkably brief. We arrive in a world already in motion. Before us, countless generations have lived, dreamed, struggled, loved, created, and disappeared. After us, countless more will do the same. We exist for a moment between two immensities: the unfathomable past and the unknowable future.
Yet despite this, we continue to search for meaning.
We build cities. We write poems. We raise children. We create art. We establish nations and institutions. We leave marks upon the world as though some part of us senses that our brief existence must somehow participate in something larger than itself.
Perhaps this is why figures like Cyrus continue to fascinate us.
Not because they were powerful, but because they represent an ancient human aspiration: the desire to create something that survives one's own mortality.
The empire of Cyrus did not survive unchanged. His body returned to the earth. The people who knew him personally vanished long ago. Yet his name remains.
This raises a profound question.
What is it that actually endures?
Is it the individual?
The monument?
The story?
The idea?
Or is endurance itself an illusion?
As I worked on these paintings, I became increasingly interested in the relationship between memory and time. The surfaces of the paintings are built through layers, erosion, concealment, and revelation. Images emerge and disappear. Forms are suggested rather than declared.
This mirrors the way history itself functions.
The past does not survive intact. It survives in fragments.
We inherit traces.
A tomb in a landscape.
An inscription in stone.
A legend repeated across generations.
A story that refuses to disappear.
The paintings are therefore not attempts to reconstruct the past. They are reflections on how the past exists within the present.
We often imagine time as a river carrying everything away. Yet human beings have always struggled against that current. Art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and religion can all be understood as responses to the same fundamental dilemma: how do we live meaningfully when we know we are temporary?
The ancient Greeks sought immortality through glory.
The Buddhists sought freedom through acceptance of impermanence.
The Stoics taught that meaning lies not in duration but in virtue.
Every civilization, in its own way, has wrestled with the same question.
How should one live beneath the shadow of time?
I do not think the paintings offer an answer.
Instead, they invite contemplation.
The story of Cyrus begins as the story of an emperor, but it ultimately becomes a story about all of us. His life is a reminder that even the most powerful human being is subject to the same conditions as everyone else: birth, change, uncertainty, and death.
Yet it is also a reminder that our actions ripple outward beyond our own lives.
Perhaps meaning is not found in defeating time.
Perhaps meaning emerges from participating in it.
We are temporary beings, but we are part of an ongoing human story that stretches far beyond our individual lives. We inherit memories, values, and traditions from those who came before us, and we pass something forward to those who will come after.
In that sense, every life becomes a bridge.
The question is not whether we will survive forever.
The question is what we contribute to the current while we are here.
That, ultimately, is what this series became about for me.
Not an emperor.
Not an empire.
But the enduring human search for purpose, against the unceasing river of time.
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