There are voices that never arrive, yet they haunt us more than the ones we have heard.. It is strange how silence can echo louder than speech, how absence can leave deeper marks than presence. What we call memory is perhaps nothing more than a collection of missed connections, fragments of dialogues that never began.
Man insists on speaking, even when no answer will come. It is not hope that drives him, but defiance. To send words into the void is to affirm that one exists, even if the universe remains indifferent.
The philosophers argued endlessly about meaning, about truth, about God.. but maybe what sustains us is far simpler: the stubborn act of reaching out, again and again, to something beyond ourselves.
Nietzsche once said that when you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss stares back.
But what if the abyss remains indifferent, refusing to answer? Perhaps then the real confrontation is not with the void, but with ourselves..our own hunger for recognition, for an echo, for proof that we are not alone inside our skulls.
We like to imagine ourselves logical, armored, immune to sentiment. Yet logic has never silenced the trembling of the heart. One can dissect time, calculate probabilities, invoke reason..but in the end, the pulse betrays what the mind denies. And maybe that is the tragedy.. not that reason fails, but that it succeeds, and still leaves us restless.
What remains, perhaps, is the recognition that silence is not always a void waiting to be conquered, but a mode of being we must inhabit. Heidegger spoke of Being-toward-death ..the idea that our finitude gives shape to our existence. In the same way, some silences are not obstacles but frontiers, reminding us that our steps are measured against limits we cannot cross. The burden of unanswered words is heavy, yes, but in carrying it we confront ourselves , not in abstraction, but in the concrete rhythm of endurance, of walking without certainty, yet still walking.
So it is not Sisyphus I think of anymore, condemned to circle endlessly around a fate he never chose, but Odysseus: wandering, lost, yet still moving, because in the act of moving lies a certain fidelity to life itself.
I tell myself I am guided by logic, by clarity, but every word betrays an undercurrent I rarely admit: that behind the analysis there is a pulse, and behind the pulse, a longing.
Maybe this is what I share with those unheard voices, not a naive hope for answers, but the refusal to vanish without leaving a trace. "authenticity begins when we face the void of nothingness without disguise", perhaps my gesture is just that.. to carve, however faintly, a mark into the indifferent dark. Not as conquest, but as testimony. A quiet defiance, saying: I was here, and I did not allow absence to speak alone.
And still, I wonder, perhaps I write these lines for the same reason. A
gesture without certainty, a dialogue that may never find its reader,
yet still feels necessary.
-M.
