One of the craziest novels ever written contains one of the sharpest and most heartfelt reflections on death in all of literature. The book is Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne, who as a priest and with his knowledge of the human soul manages to put such complex concepts into words. The protagonist overcomes a serious illness after seeing death face to face. A friend tells him that he has been saved by a miracle, and he replies: “But at this rate, the life I have left is not much: that son of a bitch has already discovered my home.” Sterne was a somewhat unorthodox priest, as well as a Protestant. Yes, the truth is, once death touches you, you already know that it is out there and it is more difficult to continue with your things as if nothing had happened. In the book, the protagonist only sees the option of leaving by legs and fleeing as long as possible.
I don’t know if they heard about the news from two weeks ago, the death of that indigenous person from the Brazilian Amazon who had been living alone in the jungle for 26 years. The details were moving, if you put yourself in his place, although it is something increasingly difficult, because it seems that the world revolves around each one of us. But we are talking about an exceptional person. He was one of those natives not contacted by civilization, especially after an unforgettable first contact: hitmen of landowners murdered his entire tribe in the nineties and he was the only one who was saved. Since then he wandered around alone, although some state officials watched him from a distance, respecting his wish not to have any more relationships with such wild types. For me, this thing that they secretly spied on him for 26 years, in a kind of Truman show, even if it was for his own good, disturbs me deeply. Walking through the jungle, he would have the feeling that there was someone else there, that an abstract being was watching him and that perhaps there was another world beyond. Something religious, only in his case we know that everything was true: it was us. Poor man, you see what a plan, depend on us.
I don’t know how anyone can get over the slaughter of their entire family and community, and then go on totally alone in the world, never seeing anyone again. I would think that he would be the last man on earth, and we didn’t even talk about flirting, forget it. What idea would he have of what life is on this planet, the meaning it has, if he couldn’t even go to the movies to distract himself. They called him the man with the hole because in the huts he built, since he moved from house to house a lot, always from here to there, there was a deep hole of one meter eighty. It is not known what it was for. Going underground for a while, in a hostile world, is still a reasonable option.
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I don’t know what relationship it would have with that son of a bitch, death. The truth is that one day he sensed that her time had come, he lay down in her hammock and began to wait for her covered in macaw feathers. That’s how they found it. That elegant way of saying goodbye after a life that, in short, had some drawbacks, contains an instinctive poetry and a way of being in the world of the human being, despite all the adversities, which is beautiful and exciting. The man in the hole endured with what he had and without losing his composure. And we, who watched over him as a superior being and know everything, know nothing. We are like him, also naked in the world, perhaps a little more lost, surely more controlled, with fewer resources, more fragile. But if they cut our gas, turn down the heat and take a quick shower, I say we’ll get by.
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