Macbeth says that “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing..” Schiller’s view was that we should tremble before the slow, silent power of time”. Bozzo said that “Women give birth astride a grave, the day shines for an instant and then the night returns.” Celan tells us that “life happens between two nights while the living is brought to forever.”
Time is the cornerstone of our history. Sometimes it runs, other times it jiggles, from time to time it stops and sometimes it disappears in an eternal instant. When we are born, time does not exist, we live in moments, in the here and now. The baby is the urgency of food, of hug, of rest in the now. Growing up is becoming aware of time. Adolescence is a non-time, a tidal wave of life with an almost mechanical acceleration of vital routines that change at every moment. Adolescence is lived without binding time, in a confused fear without words, with the uncertainty of what will come tomorrow. Time has not been threaded into history yet.
Early adulthood transforms us into wizards of future times, we leave moments behind and begin to have a sense of time fleeing from the present and running to the future. We escape from now, from today in search of tomorrow. A future that we want to control from today, with our intelligence trying to govern reality. But this is an incomplete time, it is a stage of inertia towards the next, a ride in which time is confused with life itself. According to Heidegger, that is what we are, our being is mere presence in time (Dasein). It is in old age that we come to understand time from hope. In hope time is rescued from its dispersion, glued into before, now and after. The events are integrated into a coherent and meaningful vision. A story without hope is absurd, unspeakable. Hope turns time into transit with a destination. But not in a predetermined destiny, freedom rescues us from a fatal destiny, foreseen, alien, already given. It is in hope when we understand that nothing belongs to us, that everything is a loan, it rescues us from a wandering, disconnected life. It is then when feeling and understanding in symbiosis find the way to the destination that lies beyond the foam of time.
Hope leads us to the encounter of being, it allows us to walk through our own inner tumult in search of that individual meaning beyond ourselves. Hope gives us continuity in life and in history. We live when we give, when we transmit and preserve that continuity through hope.
Today is Easter Sunday!
References
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, 1953
From threshold to threshold by Paul Celan, 1955
Being and Time by M Heidegger, 1927