Amen

"Since from boy, from when I was in my 20s, I wanted to write about theater. I was a real theater buff, eating bread and theater. I didn't have much money and the little I had I spent on going to theater. Then, as often happens in life, there were encounters that somehow diverted this early vocation of mine: there was philosophy, and there was psychoanalysis, which completely absorbed me. In the last few years, however, I began to filing some notes with the idea of returning to theater. I came back to see theater, I came back to read about theater. And during the first lockdown I began to gathering these notes and to writing a text; I did what, in a small way, Noah does in the Bible in the aftermath of the flood. While I was writing this text there was death all around. Sounds of bells, of ambulances, a deserted Milan, our old people dying. And so I wrote this text. As the great painter Rothko would say, when you make art you either talk about life and death or you better not make it. I followed this indication. At the heart of this text is the relationship between life and death, and there are questions. Questions about what will be after life, whether there will be "an after," and what will we be like after life, that is, the problem of the resurrection of life after death. Certainly there is this great theme, but above all there is the theme of how life can resist the temptation of death, how we can continue to to be alive even though we are destined for death and even though we have death around to us. Amen is thus the word that enshrines the possibility that life can exist even where death is, that death cannot be the last word on life. Amen means "so be it," "let it be so," that life may be alive, that death may not be the last word on life. [...] There is an encounter in my story, which is then at the origin of this text, to which I return constantly throughout my life as an intellectual. And that is the fact that I was born destined for death. from small the doctors gave me no chance of survival. The doctor, so my mother told me, called the priest to substitute for science. I was a child who, at the time of baptism, receives last rites. Baptism - extreme unction is the rhythm of our existence, opening and closing. Of this he speaks_ Amen_."

Massimo Recalcati