Читать книгу Festina Lente - Ana Cristina Leonardos - Страница 20

Unless we are afflicted by the syndrome portrayed in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Benjamin Button is born with the appearance of an old man and rejuvenates throughout his life, until he finishes it as a newborn), our destiny is to live in this time that stretches and contracts, as we gradually experience our end.

Between beginning and end, we live a true saga of indeterminations, the most dramatic of which is the absolute ignorance of the duration of life.

We undertake what could be called the “march of existence” — simultaneously open and finite. We are born and head toward the unknown — some more upright than others, some more aware of the uncertainties along the way, and others less so.

Swiss sculptor Giacometti shaped this universal human anguish in the sculpture L’homme qui marche. The lofty longilineal figure — in rough bronze, with one leg extended forward in a lengthy and firm stride — summarizes the movement of human existence and the strength from resilience we have to rely on along this journey.

It is difficult for us to admit that only in death will we reach the exact curvature of the arc of life. Even more challenging is for us to imagine that this arc — unknown and from a parabola that is only outlined — envelops the power that impels us to live.

In The Denial of Death, the American philosopher Ernest Becker states that the awareness of our mortality is so deeply rooted in our psyche that, whether we think about it or not, it affects the way we live in this world, it shapes the decisions we make, determines how we invest our time and, most importantly, it shapes who we become.

For Heidegger, we are beings released into the world, aware of our own finitude, and permeated with anguish. This anguish, which is sometimes paralyzing, is also what drives us and moves us to create.

The notion of finitude is a human trait. Without the notion of death, everything that humans are able to build around themselves would have little or no meaning. Based on this point of view, the end becomes the focus of light on the path taken.

Thus, human existence becomes an eternal dose of anguish: neither too much that it prevents us from acting, nor so little that it robs us of the meaning and significance of our desires.

In his text On Transience, Freud tells us how the ephemeral essence of life would lead to an increase in enjoyment and pleasure, as well as an appreciation of the moments experienced.

The awareness of transience can, however, be a painful experience and, in the name of preserving our psychic survival, we resort to self-deception. When conceptualizing self-deception as a strategy for human survival, sociologist and philosopher Eduardo Gianetti suggests that it is only when we forget to remember our finitude that we are able to live as long as we have time to live.

Art, with its images and metaphors, offers us another variety of resources to deal with the difficulty in accepting our finitude. Art invites us to observe life and death from new angles.

The play Elefante, by Igor Angelkorte, launches us into a science fiction in which humans have the option of aging or not. It is an allegory of a future in which death would not be a certainty, and almost everyone takes the pill of eternity. Those who do not want to take it seek refuge on an island called Seneca, opting for the finite and transitory life that we know today. It happens that the others, who aspire to eternity, also encounter their end; an accidental end or even that of another kind, that is perhaps more tragic: the weariness of inanity, the banality of meaningless actions, and the anguish generated by the prospect of eternal permanence. The play narrates the drama of this choice.

The film April, by Nanni Moretti, portrays the impact of becoming aware of the time that we don’t have to lose. The protagonist turns 44 and is gifted a measuring tape by a friend. The friend asks him to indicate there how many years he wants to live. He responds with 80. The friend marks 44 centimeters and extends the measuring tape to 80 centimeters. Stunned, upon realizing that the interval that remains is small, he regrets not having indicated a number closer to 100. The sudden awareness that life is finite makes him immediately embrace his dream project.

Aware or not, we are always engaged in a long conversation with time. That time that advances with us, side by side; the time we perceive as past, and also what we see in front of us.

In The Bow and the Lyre, the poet Octavio Paz tells us about how pre-Columbian cultures expressed the passing of time. Through arrival and farewell rites, they celebrated the death of one time and the birth of a new time, respectively. The Burial of Time stone, in the Anthropology Museum of Mexico, represents this ancient ritual: “Surrounded by skulls, lie the signs of the old time; from its remains, the new time emerges”.

Besides our mortal and finite human identity, two authors remind us of what is essentially the female mark.

In her classic Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés describes the female archetype as that which is viscerally connected to nature, that “instinctively knows when things should die and when they should live”.

Simone de Beauvoir reminded us that we are not born women: we become women. The authorship of the process of constructing female identity during middle age would, therefore, involve, with each generation, the choice and the definition of what should die and what should remain.

It seems to us to be the moment for us, women in our fifties, to have with these times — old time and new time — a transformative chat.