Tag: philosophy

Today, we have reached a point where it is impossible to produce a scholar like the old ones, who kept more or less up to date with everything new in many areas of knowledge. The specialist himself finds it humanly impossible to keep up with advances in his specialty. And so the question arises: how many today are capable of making the great syntheses that are so necessary for orientation? Hard to say… But it is fortunate to note that the major themes have not changed, and that it does not take much to achieve an incomplete but fruitful orientation.

It is no use: either one values what is painful in the past, or one can make little use of it. Time does not return, and it teaches less what requires less effort to absorb. Where it hurts lies an opportunity, and one can only take advantage of the past when one assimilates the paradox of recognizing in it one’s present identity while accepting the part of what was, but is now gone.

Perhaps no more valuable lessons can be learned from life than those that come from intense and prolonged anguish. The moment when this is finally overcome is a milestone, because it usually involves an unusual internal effort. Then comes the effort and the catharsis. The tension eases, a positive feeling emerges, but what happened is not forgotten: it remains a living and authentic learning experience, through which the burden of learning has been felt on the skin

There is something marvelous about these very frequent flashes experienced in the immediate vicinity of death, which spring up as if clarifying the whole life, accompanied by an unprecedented lucidity—unprecedented, just before dying! Rationalizing the phenomenon is pointless, but surely something is happening when the events of a lifetime are finally closed, when they can be connected now that they have taken place, and a final meaning can be inferred. Even the outside observer can see that; but to experience it and feel it, that untranslatable something that transforms and convinces, that pacifies and enlightens, it is a pity that, if it is delayed, in others we can only admire it…