Todos vosotros que amáis el trabajo salvaje y lo rápido, nuevo, extraño —os soportáis mal a vosotros mismos, vuestra diligencia es huida y voluntad de olvidarse a sí mismo. Si creyeseis más en la vida, os lanzaríais menos al instante. ¡Pero no tenéis en vosotros bastante contenido para la espera —y ni siquiera para la pereza! FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
One feels free in relationships of love and friendship. It is not the absence of ties, but ties themselves which set us free. Freedom is a word which pertains to relations par excellence. Without hold there is no freedom
Not the least cause for today’s temporal crisis is the absolute value attached to the vita activa. This leads to an imperative to work, which degrades the human being into an animal laborans. The hyperkinesia of everyday life deprives human existence of all contemplative elements and of any capacity for lingering. It leads to a loss of world and time. So-called strategies of deceleration do not overcome this temporal crisis; they even cover up the actual problem. What is necessary is a revitalization of the vita contemplativa. The temporal crisis will only be overcome once the vita activa, in the midst of its crisis, again incorporates the vita contemplativa.
Quien intenta vivir con más rapidez, también acaba muriendo más rápido. La experiencia de la duración, y no el número de vivencias, hace que una vida sea plena.
the reason for the feeling that time passes much more quickly than it used to. Due to the temporal dispersal, no experience of duration is possible. Nothing comports time.1 Life is no longer embedded in any ordering structures or coordinates that would found duration. Even things with which we identify are fleeting and ephemeral. Thus, we become radically transient ourselves. The atomization of life goes hand in hand with an atomization of identity. All we have is our self, our little ego. We are subject to a radical loss of space and time, even of world, of being-with. Poverty of world is a phenomenon of dyschronicity. It reduces the human being to a tiny body that is kept healthy at all costs. Otherwise, what would we have? The health of one’s fragile body is a substitute for world and God. Nothing outlasts death. Thus, dying is particularly difficult today. And we age, without becoming old.
Truth also consists of relationships between events. Truth occurs when things communicate with each other on the basis of a similarity or some other form of closeness between them, when they turn towards each other and enter into relationships with each other, even befriend each other: truth [la vérité] will be attained by him [the author] only when he takes two different objects, states the connection between them … and encloses them in the necessary links of a wellwrought style; truth – and life too – can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor[, thus linking them to each other through the ineffable efficacy of the combination of words].22 Only relationships based on similarity, friendship or affinity make things true. Truth is opposed to the accident of pure contiguity. Truth means commitment, relationship and closeness. Only through intense relationships do things become real in the first place:
As soon as one looks deeper into being one recognizes that all things are interconnected, that even the least of them communicates with a whole world. But the age of haste does not have the time to heighten perception. Only in the depth of being does a space open in which all things lie close to one another and communicate with one another. It is just this friendliness of being which gives the world its scent.
Although hesitation is not a positive act in itself, it is constitutive of the act. What distinguishes acting from labouring is not a surplus of activity, but the capacity to pause. Whoever does not know how to hesitate is a labourer.
If the goal is the sole point of orientation, then the spatial interval to be crossed before reaching it is simply an obstacle to be overcome as quickly as possible. Pure orientation towards the goal deprives the in-between space of all meaning, emptying it to become a corridor without any value of its own. Acceleration is the attempt to make the temporal interval that is needed for bridging the spatial interval disappear altogether. The rich meaning of the path disappears. Acceleration leads to a semantic impoverishment of the world. Space and time no longer mean very much.
Un placer delicioso me invadió, me aisló, sin noción de lo que lo causaba. Y él me convirtió las vicisitudes de la vida en indiferentes, sus desastres en inofensivos y su brevedad en ilusoria, todo del mismo modo que opera el amor, llenándose de una esencia preciosa; pero, mejor dicho, esa esencia no es que estuviera en mí, es que era yo mismo. Dejé de sentirme mediocre, contingente y mortal.
El tiempo transcurre a plena luz del día con tanto sigilo como el ladrón en la noche. Clavar la mirada en el tiempo, gritar hasta que el miedo lo petrifique: ¿redención o catástrofe?
Las prácticas sociales tales como la promesa, la fidelidad o el compromiso, todas ellas prácticas temporales que crean un lazo con el futuro y limitan un horizonte, que crean una duración, pierden importancia.
