Human Suffering Often Becomes A Silent Burden
A painful past can cast a shadow over any new beginning, making it difficult to distance yourself from past experiences.
Moans? Where was it? He put his hands to his neck. His hands were wet. His throat was wet. His chest was wet, his face... He opened his eyes. He still didn't quite realize where he was, in the swamp among the pines or somewhere else? He didn't realize he was in Paris. A white moon hung above an unknown world. A pale light hung over the darkness, like the summons of a martyr. A white death screamed voicelessly in the pale, iron-colored sky. The full moon, behind the woods, could be seen through the window of a room of the International Hotel in Paris. Ravic stood up.
What had been? A railway full of blood, blood flowing, a mad rush on a summer evening, along the bloody tracks - the dream repeated a hundred times, when he pretended to be in Germany again, that he was surrounded, persecuted, pursued by the executioners of a bloody regime that had legalized murder; how often had he passed through all this! He looked at the moon, the white vampire absorbing the colors of the world with its borrowed light. These dreams, full of the horror of the concentration camps, full of the frozen figures of the murdered friends, full of the tearless faces, petrified by pain of those who still survived, full of the hopeless separations and the loneliness beyond any lamentation.
To what extent do you feel that you can change the perspective seen through a new understanding, into a totally different conceptual reality, when you break away from everything that keeps you anchored?
During the day he could manage to pass the barrier, the wall higher than his eyes - the wall he had managed to build during years of struggle, desires choked with cynicism, buried memories, trampled underfoot, when you broke from yourself everything, even the name, is cement built over your own feelings - and when, in spite of all this, from time to time the livid face of the past bursts forth in a moment of indulgence, sweet, alluring and full of calls, when you plunge drunk until unconscious.
During the day - but at night you are at their mercy, the brakes of discipline escape you and the wagon begins to slide, back to the horizon of consciousness, they rise again, they break the tombs, the barriers are opened, the shadows turn, your blood boils, the terrors run and the black storm go over all fortifications and barricades! To forget - it's easy as long as the beacons of will illuminate the world - but when they go out and the noise of worms becomes perceptible, when a destroyed world emerges from the waves like a sunken Eggplant and lives again - then it's something else entirely. You can drink, get drunk, go night after night, to overcome all this - you can change nights into days and days into nights - during the day you dream differently than at night, without losing, detached from everything.
When you try to transform your perception of the world, aren't you actually seeking a clearer view of your reality, trying to maintain the image of a unitary self?
Hadn't he done all that? How many times had he not returned to the hotel when the gray colors of the morning were creeping along the streets? Or had he not waited in the Catacomb, with someone who was allowed to drink with him until he came from Scheherazade, Morosow who continued to drink with him under the artificial palm tree, in that windowless room, where only the clock showed how much the light outside had grown ? Getting drunk in a submarine, that was it. It's easy to shake your head and say you have to keep your sensitivity. But damn it wasn't that easy! Life was life, good for nothing and above all; you can get rid of her, that's easy too.
But don't throw away with it the hope of revenge and don't throw away with it that thing spit on, mocked, ridiculed day by day and hour by hour, which is called, no doubt in a crude way, faith in humanity and humanity! A dry life - you can't throw away like that, like an empty magazine! She's still good enough to fight her, when and if the time comes. Not for personal reasons, not even for revenge, not for selfishness, not for altruistic reasons, yet it is so much for you to turn the wheel, to push the world beyond the blood and the wreckage--for no other reason than fight, the fight continues, and wait for the opportunity to fight until the last breath.
How is this alternation between daytime control and nighttime chaos reflected in your perception of the world, seeking a point of balance between disclosure and concealment?
But waiting wears you down and can be hopeless, and to that is added the unspoken fear that when the time finally comes, you will be too crushed, too raw, too inert from so much waiting, too tired to walk with the others. This is not the reason why you plunge into oblivion anything that can get on your nerves, abolishing it, definitively and unconsciously, with irony, sarcasm and even counter-sentimentality, with the escape into another human being, into a self foreigner? Until you reach this state, brutal impotence will return as you surrender to sleep and ghosts.
While waiting consumes us and often seems hopeless, it amplifies our unspoken fears, leaving us crushed by the inertia of long periods of waiting. It is precisely this sense of exhaustion that prompts us to detach, using irony, sarcasm, and even counter-sentimentality as protective shields against emotional discomfort. Our escape becomes the escape into another being, into a foreign "I", as an attempt to avoid the state of helplessness that grips us during sleep and disturbing dreams.
Leadership involves resisting the realities that come back to your memory, seen through the prism of a much faster exposure of the inner movement.
Human suffering often becomes a silent burden that follows us even in the most unexpected places. Moreover, tragic memories can invade quiet moments, turning into visions that disrupt present reality.
* Note: Remarque, Erich Maria, Arcul De Triumf, Eminesu Publishing House, 1976
