Everything that begins ends. We know this from Titus Lucretius, an epicurean poet and lover who was driven crazy by a filter of love, and in moments of lucidity he wrote De rerum natura (On the nature of things), a scientific and atheist epic in verse (dedicated to the goddess Venus ) who revealed the secrets of matter and atoms almost one hundred years before Christ, and ended his life when he wanted, throwing himself on his sword. Cicero composed and edited this extraordinary book, precisely the one that the skeptical philosopher David Hume reread when in 1776 he was dying of an intestinal tumor. Because indeed, everything that begins ends, and it is advisable to know this and not take it too lightly. Geoff Dyer, famous English writer and journalist fond of almost everything, learned at a certain age that things end, and published a book about those endings. With a journalistic trick in order to sell more copies, he titled it The Last Days of Roger Federer, which is barely published, and reserved it for the subtitle and other endings, which is where the crux of the matter is. The things that are ending, or are ending. Because? That’s the question, and being a melancholic question, Dyer doesn’t touch on it much. He rather writes a personal diary from when he was trying to write The Last Days of Roger Federer. It does not speak of the end of winters, nor of politics replaced by fictions, nor of the end of literature precisely because of this excess of fictions of reality (there will no longer be a need for more stories), nor even of the end of rock, one of their passions, music that will end when it is made and sung by contortionist and transgressive robots, much more scenic. He also loves cinema, so he does not contemplate it ever ending, once and for all, which for me already happened years ago. Not because of television platforms, but because of mobile phones in movies, which end all the classic plots (adventure, mystery, thriller, comedy). With cell phones and without cigarettes, there is no intrigue, no excitement, nothing. And thus we arrive at the saddest end of all things, which not even Lucretius mentioned. The one that goes unnoticed. Nobody realizes that this is over. Since everything ends.
2023-10-29 04:29:51
