end of the world | Alessandro Davina

Two recent space news.

One: We know that as a certain type of star gets older, it expands, but for the first time, we’ve got images A planet 13,000 light-years away from us, crashing into one of these stars with a puff of dust.

Two: the possible origin of Quasars (QUASI STELLAR: quasi-stellar light source). Discovered sixty years ago, they are the most powerful celestial bodies known: they shine like a trillion stars but in a space as small as our solar system they can be. A study of the 48 galaxies present in it revealed that quasars are the result of a collision between two galaxies. Astrophysicists tell us about the past, discovering the constants that regulate the universe in the same way that some birds migrate and almond trees blossom: The discovery of our origin is a hypothesis about our future. In fact, these two researches, even if they were completely independent, declared to us, precisely because of the regularity of the universe, that the world would end for one of these two reasons: Or the sun, which is one of those stars that expand with age, will swallow us or Our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy.

when? Either way, the two events are assumed to be 5 billion years from now: The end is confirmed and has an indicative deadlineLike foods.

Who cares, you’ll say the universe is 14 billion years old and we’re only 2 million: there’s still “all the time” before the “end of the world”! are we sure?

Saint-Exupéry’s oft-misused phrase that one can see well only with the heart picks up an unsentimental point, confirmed by quantum physics: See what we are. We discover outside ourselves what we carry inside: in the negative when we do not want to face it, such as when we see our own shortcomings in others (how stingy, touchy, envious … they are because we are first and foremost); Positively when we recognize something external that we first welcomed within ourselves (those in love discover the sky, those who are saddened by the moon). Thus when we discover certain natural phenomena, we see ourselves: our origin is our future.

So, in the remaining five billion years, there is not only a deadline, but a reminder of desire. Giuseppe Ungaretti had already guessed this when he wrote on a piece of paper in the trenches during the First World War, one summer night:

“Locked in the deadly things.”
(Even the starry sky will end)
Why do I miss God? ”

(condemnation – June 29, 1916).

He felt in his body the “annihilation” of everything, even the starry sky with its infinite illusion already indicated on the charts of the soul by Leopardi. But the last verse testifies, in the face of the “finishing” of all things, that something in us stubbornly continues to “finish”: the word God in fact comes from an ancient root for the word “light,” from which it seems as distant as Zeus in greek, He dies (day) in Latin, divine in Italian.

In the face of the darkness that shrouds our origin and our end, the heart longs for the light.

But what am I supposed to do in 5 billion years if I only have a few dozen left? Get them into those dozens, make them “the end of the world”. like? A story by Russian writer, naturalized Frenchman Andre Mackin, says it well, and is about a childhood memory in stifling Soviet Russia. Playing hide-and-seek among the deserted stands that housed party representatives who had been applauded by the crowd until a few hours earlier, a child finds a woman, alone, tearfully reading her lover’s letter: «She was not the first woman to dazzle her. me with its beauty. Yet she was the first to reveal to me that the woman who loves does not belong to our world but creates another and remains there, sovereign, inaccessible to the frenzied greed of days gone by… The modest beauty of a female face with lowered eyelids made the stands absurd and those who occupied them Men claim to be prophets of history. And the truth was expressed by the silence of that woman, by her loneliness, by her love so great that even the unknown child who came down the stairs was forever dazzled ».

This face makes the child understand that the Garden of Eden that Communism promised him and instilled in the school was a lie, because the essence was missing: “Everything was expected in an ideal society: the enthusiastic action of the masses, the brilliant advances of science and technology, the conquest of space that would take man Towards unknown galaxies, material abundance and sensible consumption associated with a radical change in mentality. Everything, absolutely everything! Except… I didn’t think of ‘love’, I simply saw the young woman again in the midst of the wonderful sunny calm of snow. Woman with her eyes closed Her face is inclined toward the one she loves.”A brief book of eternal love).

The face of that woman mourning her loved ones, who perished in the war desired by those who had occupied those same positions so soon before, revealed the power with which man and states deceive themselves that they exist, that they are masters of time, and that they oppose it by the only one. The way to really succeed: love. actually Those who like “all the time”: receiving it (from a caress, from a beautiful thing, from a friend …) and giving it (in a caress, doing something beautiful, to a friend …). On the other hand, for those who try to seize time, use and use things etc (thus waging war in various ways), the world is constantly ending.

Love, like light, bends time and space in a kind of law of “existential relativity.”It is the law of “universal relationship”. Indeed, we say of a thing that it is “the end of the world” because it is so beautiful (beauty is love in action) that it creates a new one, as does the love of women in the stands, and because someone destroys it, as those who occupied the same positions.

Love or lack of love: it is up to us to choose which “end of the world” to doWithout waiting for the sun to swallow us up or Andromeda to run over us.