About Beauty and Consolation

Part IV

Patricia de Martelaere

Amsterdam, May 4t 2021–  May I terminate with your own question?

“You just ask them now.”

What makes this existence worthwhile for you?

“The question is wrong, although I have put it to the whole world myself. 

How can you make this existence worthwhile? 

That had been the right question. 

He didn’t really seem to answer. Now it is. What is not threatened has no value. Now that everything is under threat, everything has value. Everything was and is worthwhile. 

Everything shines. And it shines bright.

There is nothing in my life right now, right at the end, that was not or is not worthwhile. 

A silver foil tinkling in front of you in a street gutter, chitchat on the television, the light of your desk lamp falling on a book you’ll never read, the sound of a brushcutter in the distance, the voice of my wife making something unintelligible somewhere from the belly of the house, the rain that pours on your face as if you were sixteen again and you are on your way to school in your poncho on your new Puch, the colors of the Andromeda Nebula, the narcissistic stupidity of a baby that playing with a razor in Washington, the smell of burning meat on your neighbors barbecue, everything, absolutely everything, is equally valuable, including your memories of all those moments when you failed, the moments you were ashamed of, they taste sweet now. If you are going to miss everything, everything is dear to you. “

Patricia de Martelaere