The Desert of the I

  In the beginning was the Word. Or, was it? Nope, in the beginning there was nothing. There was chaos. Darkness everywhere. In the beginning there was instinct. There were impulses which did not find this convenient means of expression, reflection. In the beginning not a single word, not a single syllable was or needed to be uttered. In the beginning there was darkness. Only darkness. Now, someone said, and we can repeat, that humankind, and I, a single individual, am a replication of humankind, my kind, is always repeating the same process over and over again, existing, being born again and again, like we’re always beginning anew the same process of creation and destruction over and over again. Our species was born in darkness. We are born in darkness too. Our species had to learn how to utter feelings and how to express ideas, we have to do the same. And every single new generation of humans have to learn to do the same, and every single individual has to learn to do the s...

“You woke up today and looked at yourself in the mirror. Your face, your facial expression, your eyes, your gaze, are different. No, it’s not the wrinkles that are starting to appear. No, it’s not your tired appearance. No, it’s not the years that insist on passing, and that line up before your eyes to tell you: time is passing. No, there’s something else, something that was never there before or, if it was, it was always hidden or just budding. You can’t smile like you used to anymore. Something has stolen the innocence from your smile. It won’t be the same again. Your eyes seem to eternally gaze into space, you can’t look at yourself. Without saying a word, you ask yourself: What now? Where to go? Which direction to turn? Who to talk to? What to read? The questions line up and, without answering any of them, you carry on. Another day. The train, the people on the train, the job, the people at work, the clock is set to work. Your day was already planned long before it began. On ...

  (…)   Here, where we are reviewing the “types” of men with whom we deal in the world, we finally see the real product of all the revolutions, all the transformations of human thought in recent centuries. This type of man, already seen as the bearer of absolute despair, of a meaningless, empty, absurd existence after the “death of God,” will, in fact, appear more as someone who has learned not to take things as seriously as religious men, philosophers, and scientists do. Literature, beginning in the 19th century with Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and, very strongly, in the 20th century, will explore this “human type” to exhaustion. Its most perfect model will certainly be Mersault, a character in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger . Mersault is the man who sees all things in life in a natural, direct way. He has a relationship with things and people that is not tied to artifice. He does not know how to play a character. If he does not feel any affection for his mot...