Two breaking space news.
The first: We know that a certain type of star expands as it ages, but for the first time we’ve taken pictures of a planet 13,000 light-years away from us falling into one of these stars with a cloud of dust.
The second: the probable origin of quasars (QUAsi stellaR: quasi-stellar light source). Discovered sixty years ago, they are the most powerful known celestial objects: they shine like a trillion stars, but in a small space like our solar system could be. Examination of 48 galaxies in which they occur has revealed that quasars are the result of two galaxies colliding. Astrophysicists tell us about the past and discover the constants that regulate the universe, just as some birds migrate and almond trees bloom: the discovery of our origin is a hypothesis about our future. In fact, these two quests, while completely independent of each other, precisely because of the regularity of the cosmos, tell us that the world will end for one of two reasons: either because of the Sun, which is one of those stars that expand with age , will swallow us or our galaxy will collide with Andromeda’s.
If? In both cases, the two events are assumed to last 5 billion years: the end is certain and has an indicative deadline, like eating.
Who cares, you will say, the universe is 14 billion years old and we are only 2 million: there is “all time” until the “end of the world”! We are sure?
Saint-Exupéry’s often-misused phrase about seeing well only with the heart makes a point that is anything but sentimental and is confirmed by quantum physics: We see what we are. We discover outside of ourselves what we carry inside: in the negative, when we don’t want to face it, for example when we see our faults in others (how stingy, sensitive, envious … they are because we are it in the first place are line); positive when we recognize something on the outside that we first welcomed within ourselves (those who are in love discover heaven, those who are melancholic discover the moon). So when we discover certain natural phenomena, we see ourselves: our origin is our future.
Therefore, in the remaining 5 billion years, there is not just a deadline, but a reminder of the wish. Giuseppe Ungaretti had already guessed this, writing on a piece of paper one summer night in the trenches of World War I:
“Closed in mortal things
(even the starry sky will end)
Why do I long for God?”
(Damnation – June 29, 1916).
He felt in his flesh the “mortality” of everything, even the starry sky with its illusion of infinity that Leopardi had already suggested in the soul horoscopes. But the last verse testifies, in the face of the “end” of all things, that something within us adamantly insists on “imperfection” instead: the word “god” actually comes from an ancient root for “light,” from which seemingly distant terms like Zeus arise Greek, dies (day) in Latin, divine in Italian.
Faced with the darkness that envelops our origin and our end, the heart yearns for light.
But what am I supposed to do with 5 billion years when I only have a few dozen left? Putting them in those dozens and making them the “end of the world.” As? A story by Russian writer and naturalized Frenchman Andreï Makine gets straight to the point and revolves around a childhood memory in suffocating Soviet Russia. Hiding among the deserted stands, which until a few hours ago housed party officials celebrated by the masses, a child finds a single woman tearfully reading her lover’s letter: “She wasn’t the first woman who shone me with its beauty. However, she was the first to reveal to me that a woman who loves does not belong to our world but creates another and stays there, sovereign, impervious to the fevered rapacity of days gone by… The humble beauty of the female face with lowered head eyelids ridiculed the bleachers and those who occupied them and the claim of the people to set themselves up as prophets of history. The truth was expressed through this woman’s silence, through her loneliness, through her love, so great that even the unknown child coming down the steps was blinded forever.”
This face makes it clear to the child that the paradise promised to him by communism and inoculated at school was a lie because the essential was missing: “In the ideal society everything was foreseen: the enthusiastic work of the masses, the legendary progress of science and science.” Technology, the conquest of space that would take man to unknown galaxies, material abundance and reasonable consumption, combined with a radical change in mentality. Everything, absolutely everything! Except…I wasn’t thinking of “love,” I just saw the young woman again in the middle of the great, sunny stillness of the snow. A woman with her eyes closed and her face turned to the one she loves” (The Book of Short Eternal Loves).
The face of this woman mourning the loss of a loved one who died in the war and who was being sought by those who had recently occupied the same stands exposed the power with which people and states pretend that they exist, that they are masters of the times and oppose it with the only method to be really successful: love. In fact, those who love have it “all the time”: they receive it (in a caress, in a beautiful thing, from a friend…) and they give it (in a caress, in a beautiful thing, to a friend) . ..). On the other hand, for those who try to buy time, use and consume things and others (and therefore make war in various ways), the world is continually ending.
Love, like light, bends time and space in a kind of law of “existential relativity,” which is the law of “universal relationship.” In fact, we say something is the “end of the world” both because it is so beautiful (beauty is love in action), that it creates something new, as does the love of the women in the stands, and because someone destroys it, like those who, celebrated, occupied the same stands.
Love or lack of love: it’s up to us to decide which “end of the world” we want to reach without waiting for the sun to swallow us or for Andromeda to overtake us.