These past few months, I have experienced some close losses. Managing it in just a few months and being far from home has not been easy.
Kyrie
The other evening, while listening to my Spotify playlist "Classical Music to Romanticize Your Life," I was pulled out of my thoughts by what was playing: the Kyrie from Verdi's Requiem. I suddenly began to wonder what and whom Verdi was thinking about while writing this sincere melody.
Death and art have always been connected, making us ponder the infinite and develop our conceptions of what is truly transcendental. How many stories have been left in the footprints of distant lives in the form of melodies and lines?
Verdi's Requiem was a radical change in the way the society of that time viewed its relationship with the religious. Deeply moved, Verdi decided to create an entire mass to mitigate the pain of losing a friend who shared the typical values of the Risorgimento, justice, and freedom; Alessandro Manzoni. I was stunned. According to the gossip from the neighbors' stairs and a solemn plaque on the wall, one of the writer's daughters lived in the apartment below mine in Milan. I took it as a sign and began to write.
Dies Irae
Death and life, two sides of the same coin. One implies the other. While we are constantly learning to live, either by trial and error or through shared wisdom, dying is not something we can learn because of its unique nature. We only die once, end of the story.
Although we cannot experience it, humans are the only living beings who are aware of death, at least of self-death. And hence, our idea of life is built on this backdrop. Thinking, and especially thinking about death, is what makes us human.
Thus, it is the lack of understanding that makes the end terrifying. Even though mourning is an attempt to comprehend it and get closer to the unknown, every thesis is nothing more than a grand hypothesis.
Domine Jesu
In the realm of being, living is everything. Death is only death to the living. It feels too distant to me to hear about the fear of passing. Instead, the fear of not living is what truly terrifies me. If dying is ceasing to be, how can we understand it without understanding being?
I fear never understanding what it is all about; living only as I am expected to and never even realizing it. Do we need to justify our existence? Probably only trying to makes it more banal. What is ours and what is imposed? What part of the imposed has become ours and who imposed it on us? (Society! That diffuse entity that serves as a resource to talk about an ambiguous idea of the system while never pointing out anyone?).
Sanctus
Must there be a purpose? Many Greek philosophers speak of eudaimonia[1]; should it be a state of mind, a lifestyle, or a hedonistic pleasure? And, even more important, how is it achieved?
For Plato, our fundamental goal in life is to attain the highest form of knowledge, which is the idea of "good". He believed eudaimonia was a state of harmony of the soul. Instead, Aristotle stated that the purpose of life was what distinguishes us from other forms of life, namely, the ability to reason. In contrast, for Epicurus, ataraxia[2], understood as mental peace, calm, or tranquility, was the only true happiness and was achieved by eliminating worry or distress.
There have been many non-exclusive theories in history. However, the closest approach was given to me by my great-aunt, one of the absences, when I asked her “What is life about?” a couple of years ago. She replayed:
La vida és il·lusió. A mesura que et fas gran vas perdent-la i, amb ella, la vida. (Life is hope. As you grow older, you lose the enthusiasm, and with it, the life).
It was shocking to contrast it with my grandmother's response:
Anar fent. (Just keep going)
Agnus Dei
Every moment continuously terminates; the nature of the idea of time is simultaneously life and death.
Each farewell leaves a mark and memory makes us alive. Legends tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. Hence, life does not begin and end with the person.
Before we were born, we already had festivities marked on the calendar, traditional dishes and popular songs were already created and our city was already built. We are the results of the projects and the choices of our ancestors. We are the future of our grandparents, the present of our friends, and the past of our children.
[1] Eudaimonia is usually translated as happiness or well-being, but it has some of the same connotations as ‘success’, since in addition to living well it includes doing well. - Oxford Reference
[2] The state of tranquillity or imperturbability, freedom from anxiety, considered to be one of the desirable results of an immersion in scepticism, and by Epicureans to be part of the highest form of happiness. - Oxford Reference
