soldier0405

THE BREVITY OF LIFE


We can't avoid thinking of our existential condition, of the shortness of our lives, of the transitory nature of everything.

We do it all the time; we exist in all societies. The brevity of life torments the human spirit. "The proximity of death is a source

of grief during all of our life" (Edgar Morin).



Let us meditate on the superior way with which Homer expressed our condition as human beings: "Insignificant mortals,

who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but soon fade

away and are dead".



Let us list the sad music springing out of the words of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, who was also a philosopher,

reflecting on the shortness of our lives. " Life is a campaign, a brief stay in a strange region". "Time is a violent torrent, no

sooner is a thing brought to sight then it is swept by, and another takes it's place, before this too will be swept away".



Or the music of the verses of Psalms 103: "As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes,

but the wind passes over and soon all disappears, and his place will no longer exist".



These thoughts reach beyondepochs and frontiers, they plunge into the depths of our souls. They are imbued with

a serene controlled sadness, associated with the awareness of our inability to overcome the brutal force of an unjust

reality that crushes. In them lives the dignity of our conscience, our capacity of seeing beyond the present overcoming

our humble origins, of assuming ourselves as the conscience of the living universe.



In them it also consubtantiates the strength of human art, poetry, and beauty. They are away of nullifying the smallness

and insignificance of human beings, raising us to a much higher level. They are well above the world that condemns human

beings to death. In them we claim against the injustice present in the heart of life. In their way, they immortalize us.