The horror genre, editorial and cinematographic,
borns with the aim to defuse the fear of death because it’s the only element on
which we haven’t control. It’s inevitable. It’s the only event that we could
never desert. Besides it makes us equal and humble. But recent news events show
that we have defused it excessively.
It may happen to be caught by a sudden illness at
sea, in the water, and leave the quills. The current or a swimmer bring the
body back to shore. It alerts the security force and on the corpse is laid a
white cloth. What happens around? That we didn’t expect. The press reports
tragedies (drownings) occurred in different places, but they have the same post–mortem scenery: the
swimmers continued to sunbathe, play on the sand, swim, play with a ball or
with rackets… have continued to live and enjoy just a few meters away from
those bodies covered by sheet. It’s regular: a lifeless body lying on the shore
and it doesn’t unsettle and doesn’t raise other feeling that indifference,
sometimes accompanied by the desire to take some gruesome photographs. Not
silence or meditation, but dips, laughter and the usual marine chatter, because
a cadaver on the beach is an irrelevant event. It can be horror vacui? In physics this
Latin phrase indicates that nature abhors
the vacuum, and therefore it
constantly filling it (in fact, Torricelli’s experiment debunked Aristotle’s
theory). Perhaps, like the nature we want to compensate the emptiness of the
end of a life? No, we aren’t so deep, at least not deeper than a puddle.
The general indifference was cut only after the
exhortation by members of the public rescue and civil defense to assume a
dignified behavior.
Why all this should concern us? Maybe it’s a way
to pause reflecting on a phenomenon that has already produced in us habit.
Every day we perform many different activities, walking (but here it would be
better the ambivalent word “wandering”) between a long series of already dead
and rotting values. And faced with this scenery of death we are and remain
indifferent.
Source “La
Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno”, an italian newspaper, June 22, 2013, p. 16.
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