2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

10
P RELUDE
ed that patch of uneasiness that is our presence, the only thing that matters
is extension and succession of things under the sun, in their impassive serenity.
(122)
But this does not resolve the dilemma, since the world has always excluded him from the
beginning. Now death, instead of being the final experience, the last act that terminates the
series of human events by making them a closed set, becomes the sentence to remain al-
ways the same in one’s own futility. Even suffering is denied to the dead. Death should ar-
rive at the supreme moment, as to the condemned of Kafka’s
Penal Colony,
when the
victim, after hours of torture, begins to decipher on his own body the meaning of the sen-
tence and in the flash that separates him from the end of existence understands its intimate
meaning. The fate that awaits M. Palomar looks more like the fate of the officer of the story,
deprived of the quasi-mystical experience that he had managed to provide to all the con-
demned by the breakdown that kills the infernal machine while it works on its own tutor.
Mr. Palomar realizes that being dead means “resigning himself to remaining the same in a
definitive state that he can no longer hope to change” (126). Then he reflects that death, if
it cannot be lived, can at least be overcome, since one can rely
on the biological mechanism, which allows leaving to descendants that
part of the self known as the genetic heritage; and the historical mechanism,
which grants a continuance in the memory and language of those who go on
living and inherit that portion, large or small, of experience that even the
most inept man gathers and stores up. These mechanisms can also be seen
as a single one, considering the succession of generations like the stages in
the life of a single person, which goes on for centuries and millennia (125)
It may seem that the problem of death is only postponed by such a thought since it has been
shifted from the death of the individual to the extinction of human race. Further reflection
convinces Mr. Palomar of the contrary. Indeed, after the human race has long been extinct,
explorers from another planet might land on earth and retrieve the traces oh human civili-
zation, deciphers its pyramids and uncover its computers. Humanity will be reborn ‘from
its ashes’ and will continue to spread in the universe. It is easy to see that there is no end to
the process, or almost: