In the old bookcase of that ancient cabin in the mountains, Thomas’ eyes stopped before an old and dusty leather-covered volume, whose title had been erased by time. Inside it he found several pages folded, covered with handwriting. Thomas read:
“Solitude. Deep and eternal solitude. This was the initial diagnosis that my first and urgent reflections revealed to me. It is true that the remoteness of the city, in this distant hut, led me to accept this diagnosis. The widespread isolation in which we all (not only me) were immersed, surely made more than one of us feel the weight of the tyranny of loneliness. But it was not only that. What gave me that sensation was not only this forced confinement to which many of us were subjected, and which brought me, for better or for worse, to live on this mountain. It was much more. It was whatever triggered that terrible disease that fell upon humanity like a plague, disrupting everything we had known until then as “life” and dubbed “normal”, and which forced upon us confinement. It was this feeling of confusion, of uncertainty, of dread. But I also speak of desolation, daughter of the incomprehension that surrounded me, already from the beginning, but more noticeably when everything and everyone began to return to their usual lives. The voices of my friends and relatives inviting, asking, claiming, demanding, deaf and blind to the intimate pain, to the dissimulated mourning, to the endless sadness. So many people demanding me to come out of my isolation and none willing to enter… So many proposals, so many anecdotes, so many people, and yet, not a single loving hand to embrace the aching center of my being. I was expelled, submerged in the purest and densest solitude, in the cruelest silence…
But it was not, to tell the truth, a matter of solitude. I owe my new discovery to an encounter and a profound dialogue that I had in this cabin over a period of time. Chance wished that one day, just when I was heading towards the most violent despair, I met the old man of the neighboring cabin, separated only by dense trees, which yielded to the passage of the strenuous walker. After a couple of visits to his hut, this old man, very kindly, and surely touched by my spirit in sorrow, gave me one of his books, which he carefully had kept on his desk. The title of the book was WAY TO WISDOM, and the author, the German philosopher KARL JASPERS. The reading of this book awakened a deep understanding in me, of which these notes are a memory – now that I have weathered the tide and crossed, not without marks, the inferno.
Thus, one day, which brought to me the echoes of the voice of the text of my illustrious interlocutor, I could understand that what I was experiencing was not only solitude or abandonment, but much more than that; I was confronting the unassailable condition of existence. I understood – and I thanked the author for providing me with the right words – that my life was facing its own limit, that I was living a “boundary situation”.
For, in fact, the situation in which I found myself revealed to me, on the contrary, the inescapable – my inability to change the unchangeable, and more basically my own tremendous failure: failure in the face of uncertainty, in the face of the unknown future, in the face of the lurking illness, in the face of the lack of understanding and the radical loneliness of facing this existence, beyond all contact and all relationships; failure in the face of an unforeseen cataclysm of enormous proportions that came to shake my tranquility and what I knew as normal, and the inevitable affectation that this produced – after which nothing will ever be the same again – and, finally, failure in the face of the ultimate limit, as present in others as in myself: death.
It is not in vain that the author says about these situations that we cannot change, no matter how hard we try: “Boundary situations confront me with the reality of failure“. It was at that moment that I understood that no matter how hard I try, the walls that surround my existence cannot be broken down. I will be overcome by illness, suffering, loss, death… My existence finds before these impassable boundaries its only truth, its submission, its battle, its passion.
But it is not surprising to discover that my existence is surrounded by the inescapable and that our lives are condemned to face their own limits. After all, from time to time there is no lack of moments, individual and collective, that remind us of this. But that voice of the book I read gave me, on the other hand, something that can be considered extraordinary, like a discreet treasure.
Because if on one hand it made it clear to me that the boundary situation in which I found myself confronted me with my own failure, on the other hand it revealed to me that “The way in which the human being approaches his failure determines what he will become“. Here, I understood, there were essentially two possibilities; either to believe that normal life, without disturbances, without fissures, is most natural, and that everything that breaks its continuity is a bad disease from which one must get rid of as soon as possible, and meanwhile entertaining oneself by closing one’s eyes or turning away, or to submit to some belief or to some hope of salvation, or, alternatively, to take refuge in sadness, misery and resentment, in order to deny what is happening. Or else, to see what is shattered in front of one’s eyes, to admit it as a fundamental part of life, to understand that one’s own existence is constituted by some ulterior frontiers that are impossible to cross. And yet, in this last alternative, in recognizing one’s own failure, in admitting the limits of one’s own life, something happens, something shines forth that saves us from nothingness and disconsolation. What is it?
At another moment I read from Jaspers: “To limit situations we react, (…) if we really understand them, by despair and re-birth“. There I understood that until then, in the midst of my loneliness, the abandonment in which I felt and the lack of understanding, I had chosen a beautiful hope, first, and then I had sheltered myself in pain, sadness and resentment, falling little by little into despair, without surrendering myself to the situation and its deeply transforming power. For if I found myself in the most acute despair that evoked death – of my world, of what I was, of what I would never be again – why continue to cling to a life that was already changing its contours, as autumn gives way to winter? Why not surrender myself completely and without resistance to despair and mourning, and then be free to grasp a new life? Why not, after the dreaded death, be reborn? This, I understood, was not to lose myself without further ado, but on the contrary, to find myself again, to become authentically me: “We become ourselves through a change in our consciousness of being“.
Death and rebirth, awareness of the limits of my existence and transformation to become who I really am, is this not a radically different, radically authentic way of facing life? It means, as I have said, seeing the face of nothingness – illness, loneliness, suffering, chance, death – and yet discovering that life exceeds it, that even if my individual life is enclosed by limits, it is enveloped by a vaster life, a being that is not exhausted in my personal confines, and from which I can drink, with humility, to become myself.
Now I know I am so close to Nothingness, so close to Being, in this threshold of twilights and sunrises where what I can be and what I have ceased to be is at stake; in short, what I am and what I can do with this life. Constant, unavoidable limit of my days, gloom and emptiness that claim me, that shackle me, that ask from me the clear look and the honest stance in life. The night is a tunnel that demands courage to be crossed, for only the brave can discover, going to the end, the treasure of all darkness – which lies hidden, patient, long-lived and young at the same time: radiant dawn, powerful blossoming of the inner being, of true life.
But night is irresistible, and never yields its throne but for a few moments. The day produces its shadows and the light nests in the darkness. To overcome death, to mock Nothingness? Never. Everything consists in daring to be what one is, and to embrace Nothingness, to become oneself without ceasing to dance – to play – with death. The only thing that survives, beyond this dance, is the eternal and mysterious Existence.”
This blog is based upon the German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ reflection on “Boundary Situations”, contained in Chapter 2 “Sources of Philosophy”, from his book WAY TO WISDOM: AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY (1950).