Ancestry 35 - Existential Thoughts: Postcript

A great antinomy in the existence of this tragically conscious being, who is capable of sensing and thinking until his last throes, a contradiction which lurks and then comes to the fore of conscience with a frequency in proportion to our years, can be detected in the awareness of the finitude of existence whilst conscious -and the unconscious void ahead, the recognition that, as there was a beginning, there is an end approaching. Secondary to the struggle with this antinomy, I add the acknowledgement of the relative insignificance of individual existence against the backdrop of infinity of space and time, even though the subject and its conscience during life finds itself at the center of what is happening around him: each human being, during existence and only then, is positioned by default due to conscience at the center of its environment, on a pedestal so to speak, however more as a spectator and a bit-part actor, with small own potential to affect superior social and historical forces.

Given these uncertainties and irreconcilable contradictions (and alas to those who have not at least fleetingly heeded them), what is left to our beings is to embrace the unique life, within nature and the busy societies of fellow human beings: its aggregation of thoughts, feelings, experiences and impressions imprinted in the memory -of what is the ‘being-in-itself’ of philosophy; to attain a ‘closure’ of existence with the knowledge gained in the paths that life has taken. There will be nothing left for posterity, just a flickering glow; perhaps, a little joy from a fleeting sense of satisfaction a few moments before the last breath like a last look of self at an internal mirror; perhaps, some tears before the last farewell. In those moments, when the dialectical synthesis of life and death into nothingness occurs, the ‘being-in-itself’ and existence are summed up in their entirety and concluded. These last-minute flares of conscience are more than good reasons for the venture of recapping a life in writing, in its apparent futility and self-centredness, even dull when compared with other undertakings. For the time being, I subscribe to Sartre’s saying: "From now on, my freedom is clearer: the action I do today will have neither god nor man as eternal witnesses. I must be, today and forever, the only witness of myself."

I carved many stories and events out of my past, images and conversations, sensations and feelings, accumulated in memory after each passing day, such as in life from an inquisitive child (a “nosey master breaker” as grandmother used to call me) until today, as I had found an inexhaustible interest in dismantling gadgets, looking into drawers and cabinets and wardrobes, without necessarily a purpose in such explorations, simply out of curiosity. Later in life, I was reading books down to their last word, underlining phrases, obsessively taking notes, filling the margins of books with own thoughts. And there I was, trying to put all this back together: with my hands if they were dismantled gadgets or with my mind if they were thoughts and feelings: in a new order and structure, as much as I could with the little dexterity, in the former case, or the even less creativity I was endowed with, in the latter. But I have been admittedly tenacious until a conclusion and a closure: in reassembling and rearranging, in correlating and combining, without necessarily much originality, let alone added artistic value. To think and analyse incessantly was good enough in most cases, even without a positively creative accomplishment. A simple juxtaposition, comparison and enumeration of thoughts, experiences and feelings, details, as in a Proustian “search of lost time", without hierarchy, without special emphasis or intense emotional regressions, though certainly with nostalgia for what happened and passed and courage against what is left to come (as I learned from denouement from Camus' "The Outsider”) is the synopsis of admittedly average and ephemeral lives of my ancestor’s and ultimately mine. It is like a memento mori. All records will disappear into the void of time, reduced to nothing like all lives they chronicle.