Even as there’s still a week more to waste before we finally bid goodbye to 2020, let me make a wager. Days can be infinitely longer when they are expected to separate from the phase space of time. Perhaps, it’s why there are holidays to mark what’s really the shortest wait; holidays to deaden time, to make the waiting unreal, insignificant. And with Covid-19 keeping this time-stalling deferment in our midst, 2020 is already the perfect year of deadened infinite.
When time stalls at the tiniest flywheel of the cosmos, it will be endless hours of daylight. It’s when the sun caves into the most pathetic demand for truth. Indeed, nothing is more evident with a vision that sees everything in pure light.
Sadly, we’re never used to the darkness that can make this vision complete. We’re not used to seeing shadows forlorn in the wretched limpidness of truth.
That, and a reminder from Schelling: With so much daylight, we have lost all courage and might. We have lost the ‘barbaric principle .. the foundation of all greatness and beauty’. We have lost beauty in our inability to become monstrous.
For whatever it’s worth, I hope this holiday season can help us renew our commitment to this most precious principle of the earth, its true barbarity. Who knows, there’s still a chance we can break this long spell of lousy infinity? Let us then become monstrous, joyously hideous!
Cheers to the return of outrage! To the real spectacle of the earth!
Happy holidays! They call it Merry Christmas!
'Being is the scandal of Nature waiting for a new host' 