Between Eternity and a Silent place
Life and Death: The Unknown Before and After
The meaning of life is that it stops.
—Franz Kafka
I often think life is a kind of punishment, put in place by a higher force; maybe God trying to show us what it means to live with beginnings and endings, and how, no matter what we do, the inevitable will still come. This could be the definition of Hell.
When we say that death is what makes life worth living, it’s only to console ourselves, some words spoken by those who will eventually face death, a face-off always won by death. But what truly makes life worth living is not death itself, but not knowing what lures behind it. Could it be that eternity waits for us there? But who would dare to take that chance? And what form would such eternity take?
This not knowing is also the reason Death has always appeared to us as a hidden figure, mysterious, faceless, a creation of our own minds. Because our own boundaries keep us in a zone where the unknown terrifies us unless we disguise it as something we know.
We speak of acceptance as if it were courage, but most of the time it is simply fear in disguise, fear of facing an ending we cannot negotiate with, fear of the unknown that follows the moment when the lights of this life fade and we wait to see, to live what the next moment will bring, if anything at all.
Our ultimate desire is to reach or better live something no one has lived before, something no one knows or has ever seen. It is the unknown that pulls us forward, simply because it terrifies us. So we rebel against the limits placed upon us. We try, and in many cases manage to exceed every boundary imposed on us by nature: speed, communication, flight, all the extraordinary things that made the ordinary slowly become intolerable.
It sounds far better, and feels far safer, to create our own version of eternity, one where we have control, where we know what it holds for us; to reach that moment when the human being becomes truly the master of its own fate. A fate no longer decided by something we cannot see or understand, an entity that keeps us in uncertainty, but by something we measured, designed, and built ourselves.
Would that be a life worth living?
Would that be a death worth dying?
A.O. Homorodean
Thank you for giving a few minutes of your life to read this.
Your piece holds the paradox — that we live by leaning toward what we cannot understand, and that meaning does not lie in mastering fate but in allowing ourselves to meet the darkness with a fragile, questioning courage. Beautiful!