Another Choice

This primal terror, which lies curled in within each of our corporal fibers, secretes in our lives a latent fear, which is constant, of the multitudinous faces death can assume so as to take hold of our body and annihilate it – after some varied measure of suffering.

And thus it is that we all become victims of violence.

For everything, potentially, may reveal itself a source of suffering and, as we know fear is well alive in each one of us equally, we ourselves may be tempted to exert violence or, at least, to threaten it.

Because we are haunted by the fear of dying, of being torn from what we are, what we have, what we hope, by the absolute act of death, we are weak before any threat and any menace, whichever form it may take.

And so it is possible for anyone to gain power and ascendency through the exercise of threat, even before that of violence itself.

Our vital and mental explorations of the reality of existence, in search of the satisfaction, the balance and the distancing which allow us to somewhat relativize the certainty of death and of its inevitable advent, also yield as a result, according to the priorities elected by the individual consciousness of being, to detail, delineate and refine the perversion of these very values which appear to alone contribute to the shared space of transmissible civilization.

***

27