A phrase that belongs to two mental realities that indicate to each person his or her own way of looking at life. In such an anxious time, 2020 emerged with phrases full of pathos that are meant to narrate nothing less than the objective reality of the fundamental processes of life.

SENECA – Epistles to Lucilius

DYING EVERY DAY

We die every day; every day a part of life is taken from us, and even when we’re still growing, our life thins out. We lost childhood, then adolescence, then youth. All the time spent until yesterday is now lost; even this day that we are living we share with death. Just as the hourglass doesn’t need the last drop of water but rather all that has flowed out from before, so too does the ultimate hour, which ends our life, not cause death itself but rather by itself it accomplishes the death process; we arrive to it in that specific moment, but we have been heading there for a long time. After having outlined these concepts in your usual language, simply sustained and yet never more penetrating than when you put your words in the service of truth, you write: death does not come alone in one fell swoop; the one that takes us away is the last death. It is better that you read your own words instead of my letter; you will understand that this thing so dreaded by us is merely the ultimate death but hardly the only one.