The Gift of Life – Astutillo Smeriglia
https://incomaemeglio.blogspot.com/2013/09/il-dono-della-vita.html[🡕]
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Life is not a gift.
A gift is something given to someone who already exists apart from the gift, something that, once received, can also be set aside and forgotten. For example, no one is obliged to hang around their neck those ridiculous colored penises called “ties.” One can accept a tie with a polite smile and then throw it in the trash, so everyone smiles and no one feels bad. Life is not like that. Life is what you are. If you take life away you don’t become a you-without-life. You cannot accept or refuse what you are; you simply are. So whoever gave you life did not gift it to you, they imposed it on you. It is not the gift that someone made to you, but you are the gift that someone made to themselves. You are not the birthday guest politely handed a tie. The ones celebrating are the others, both guests of honor and party-goers at the same time. You are the tie. There are no hordes of existences without life waiting somewhere in the void for a benefactor to grant them one. Whoever gives life gives both life and existence simultaneously, and both are given to themselves. Each has their own particular reason, or perhaps no reason at all – that is not what matters. What matters is that life is not given to the one who is born but to the one who brings about the birth. A gift given to oneself can still be called a gift, true, but only as a joke.
But even setting all this aside and pretending that you are not your life but something else plus a house, a phone, a tie, and a life, a gift is still something given to please the receiver. The giver takes pleasure in giving pleasure. This is called altruism. Altruism is not giving pleasure disinterestedly, since it is impossible to be uninterested in what one does. Altruism is pleasing oneself by pleasing others. Both egoism and altruism aim at one’s own pleasure, but they are not the same thing: the pleasure of the first is independent of pleasing or displeasing others, while the pleasure of the second is a consequence of pleasing others. Is the giver of life altruistic? The one who gives champagne to someone who is not a teetotaler is altruistic. The one who gives a film to a cinema lover is altruistic. The one who gives a tie to someone who hates ties makes a mistake – they thought he liked them – but they are still altruistic. But the one who gives something they have no idea about – are they still altruistic? Because life is like that, a box that can contain anything, even systemic lupus erythematosus, the death of one’s children, or forty years on an assembly line. Is it altruism to give a closed box whose contents are unknown? The one who gives life does something that pleases himself, as in all actions, altruistic or egoistic, but has no idea whether it will please the recipient. That is called egoism. Life is not a gift but a bet played on someone else’s skin.
But setting this aside too, and assuming that life is always healthy, fortunate, and comfortable, the fact remains that a gift, once given, belongs to the recipient: it can be lost, stolen, or used up, but it is still at their disposal. The one who gives a tie does not demand that you return it at any moment, even immediately, without warning, without even asking politely, by coming to rip it from your neck when you least expect it. Instead, the one who claims to give life simultaneously gives the unconditional obligation to return it at any time. In other words, they give death as well. One cannot give one without the other. Whoever gives you life gives you a tie that will never be yours, a film while spoiling the ending, a champagne in a titanium bottle with no opening – in short, they give you a gift that consists in denying you that gift. Because death is not something accidental that, if it happens, puts an end to life. Death is an essential aspect of life, an aspect that defines life and makes it what it is, and in turn life is an essential aspect of death. You cannot look at a dead person without imagining them when they were alive, and you cannot look at a living person, old or young, without already seeing them dead.
Murderers are punished because they give death, but in reality no murderer can truly give death to someone. At most they can anticipate it. The ones who give death are the parents.