UNTITLED DRAFT 8
Oriana Fallaci wrote a book to respond to her little sister’s question “What is life?”, the answer can be found both at the end of the book and on its cover: “Niente e così sia”, nothing and so be it.
I read the book when I was sixteen and for a young girl with so many expectations from life could not accept it as an answer, life is nothing. I could not walk the path of its meaninglessness that we just exist to exist. I wanted to live a life of meaning and to do so I needed a different answer than Oriana’s because I cannot give meaning to meaninglessness. There must be another description.
Do we all fade into nothingness? Just like that?
It is hard to believe.
My professor once said that his greatest fear was time:
It is like a wave that brushes off whatever is on the shore. We will die physically but the real death is when time will brush off our memory from the universe, when we will be so antique no one can remember us.
So is that what our lives are? a collection of memories that we pass on to others?
What happens to those who have no one to remember them? Those who die surrounded by the shadows of the unknown? Do they just fade into that nothingness?
What an unjust end that is.
In a world so carefully designed and equilibrated, I find it hard to believe that we just cease to exist.
