A watershed event, two opposite scenarios. One who starts again from lack and is reborn, the other who becomes gangrenous and dies in lack. The sliding doors which, in their closing and opening, rewrite a story every time with a different ending. The great unknown is also the only certainty: time. The time of a life that proceeds in a single direction, forward. The time of nostalgia that does not return, the time of pleasure that flies, the time of pain that consumes, the time of love that is forever forced and bound in the finiteness of a human life, the time of memory that keeps alive the dead in the projections of the minds of those who remain. And again, the time of writers' words, the time of choices, the present time that we waste by focusing on the past, on the future and on the ifs that have not been or are not yet.
The time of reason that cannot answer the questions of the spirit, the enormous time of the Universe, the time of letting go, the time of a life lived between enthusiasm and melancholy. Time that never resets and never starts again but always continues regardless of us. The time to stop to return to a whole which is that great nothing in the state of power. The time in which everything has happened or everything is yet to happen.
Echoing philosophy, quantum physics, the light of dead stars (Recalcati), yogic meditation, faith, science, the cinema of Christopher Nolan and that of George Lucas, Our Big Nothing by Emanuele Aldrovandi is the metaliterary attempt to a writer to use the art of narration to battle death, defending the impermanence of life. Except to discover that the limit and the weak point lie in a culturally and stubbornly binary thought that manages to interpret and conceive something only in contrast to another.
What if it wasn't so? What if everything was one? What if everything was connected, what if every possibility, every aspect, every event, every thing, every living being was a part of the whole capable of containing, at the same time, that whole? What if love, in its most highly existential sense, was enough to act as a hinge between the finite and the infinite and to checkmate death, time, life and us a meaning? What if the best part of our being here and now was hidden in ephemerality?
The pleasure of reading Emanuele Aldrovandi lies in finding in his words common and shared questions that we chase and from which we simultaneously escape. The charm instead lies in never finding the answers, at least not the definitive ones but only provisional answers that lead to other questions. Which is why all that remains is to focus on the present time, because, both in research and in life, the pleasure lies in the process towards a discovery that never reveals itself, like a horizon that we see, we do not touch but which our curious gaze and fascinated he is always reaching out. Conquered, we, by a great Nothing which is everything, the Everything.