DEAD TIMES

 

The great thinkers of universal civilisation have left their mark on our lives by bringing transcendent themes to human beings in various artistic and intellectual works.

Now it's my turn to paraphrase the great French thinker Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), who spoke about ‘dead times’

‘I have neither wished nor desire anything more than to live without dead times.’

This is what Beauvoir wrote, and I'd like to analyse these words according to my own life experience.

I consider ‘dead times’ to be those moments in our lives when we don't fully exist. That succession of arid moments, like an endless desert journey. That feeling of anguish and hopelessness, lack of emotion, lack of ideas, lack of creativity.

These nefarious hiatuses are terribly lonely and deeply dreadful. But they are necessary. Because when we emerge from them, our life shines again with its own light and - as if by miracle - the explosion of creativity, artistic production and sublime emotions returns.

Life is a constant invasion of contradictory emotions and sensations. It has ups and downs, lights and shadows, loves, passions, adventures, misadventures, misfortunes and tragedies. All these elements form part of the powerful sensation of living. Even when there is tragedy, there is life. Even when there is hatred, there is life. But in the dead times, there is nothing. There is a great emptiness, there is an atrocious, inert loneliness. There is no life, there is silent and deeply dark death.

In  dead times, there is no flavour, no writing, no feelings. It's an immense and endless arid field in which the human soul seems anaesthetised by a lapse of profound silence.

Living without dead time implies "living life to the full with everything it offers: love, hate, revenge, generosity, light, charity, spirituality, passion.

In dead times, however, I can't remember myself, where I came from or where I'm going. It's a frozen moment in the immense time of nothingness.

Living implies immense courage. A call to unspeakable challenges, a constant struggle for the survival of one's own consciousness immersed in a vastness of contradictions and problems that existence itself offers us with every breath, every step, when we open and close our eyes.

Accepting this challenge makes us Herculean, it makes us imposing, it makes us humble, it makes us simple beings in the universe, it makes us immortal and at the same time fragile like a feather that flies with the wind without knowing where to land.

But all these challenges also make us human, very human, all too human.

I fully agree with the thinker - Simone de Beauvoir - about never wanting more than to live without dead times.