Field of view
During high school times, gym class outside, A. comes close and asks me about God, since I’m an atheist, and then he continues talking about death, telling me that he doesn’t like the idea that there is nothing after. He’s in a relationship, he’s good grades, his friends, has a cheerful personality. I told him, at that time already, that my “not living” was dissolving the fear of dying, and that he had to continue to accept what’s the compromise of life: either fatalism with repression, depression, and existential boredom, or life, with its many difficulties and the fear of death. The need for a cheerful boy to get close to the most inept one to discuss that topic is quite meaningful, but it’s just one of the many similar episodes.
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We come into the world with something attached to us, which I call perception. Than we grow up and this perception slowly become consciousness. Grow up more and, during primary school, this conciousness make a fundamental step: it expands its field of view meeting death and the darkness that follows. This is an essntial event in the life of an individual, even if someone doesn’t remember it clearly, and it can be postponed because of religions or other distractions, but sooner or later it comes. At that point the individual is forced, even in its still young brain, to reevaluate the meaning of the self. What happens from that point onwards is certainly the product of the personality, made from pure genetic/biology and transformed by the events that have been experienced, and it obviously changes from person to person. What most people do from that point, for their whole life, is to focus on certina things giving them a certain weight (be it family, lover, work, religion, water polo or gardening), thus managing with alleviating the awarness of death and nonsense. Sometimes, however, fear of death shows itself. Individuals, religious ones included, espress every now and then this concern, sometimes in a serious way, most of the time in a light and joking way in order to downplay and hide (to themselves too) the important nature of the issue. On the contrary, other people can’t put other elements before Death and Vanity. These individuals and their huge ego almost solipsistic reach, during their life, a field of view on things wide and more especially persistent; this doesn’t allow them to commit to any activity/thought without the oppositional presence of nihilism and fatalism; at that point, to retrocede becomes impossible because of this peculiar mental state: at a psiychofisic level there is the rooted edonistic sloth, at a psycho philosofical level there is the absolute truth of the conclusions – absolute in the conscious-logical-rational-existentialistic context, certainly not in a divine sense or whatnot; absolute because it’s based on death itself, an irrefragable element. There are many other “truths”, but those regard:
- a less wide field of view: not a universal vision but a specific one, be it about phylosofical topics or everyday ones;
- an excessively broad field of view: pure transcendental without interaction/application to the real world (God, etc.)
As old men, lived our lives, went through our experiences, understood what could be understood and recognizing the threat of death as more palpable, the attitude gets closer to the one of the devoted Houellebecqians that in their youth already gave up to things and were eating meaninglessness for breakfast. After all Svevo wasn’t talking about spiritual/cultural senility by chance. It’s not only biology, the tired body, you are simply tired.
This kind of awareness is certainly helped by the surplus of information and by capitalism in general – a society that walks fast towards dystopia surely does its part.
I watch Mouth to Mouth and I’m affected, among the other things, by the choreographies by which the director wanted to depict the emotions of the characters; I go back to reflecting about a utopian place, and I unavoidably think back to the little story of the Irishman by good ol’ Giacomo Leopardi.