Dust

In the subway, my eyes fell on some dust in the corner of my suitcase. It was like a click, a door that opened on the sudden realization that even a suitcase doesn’t last forever.

“Even Mona Lisa falls apart,” says Tyler Durden in Fight Club, as Edward Norton pulls out a broken tooth. He is not wrong: our existence passes in a flash, it is transitory and made only of transitions: one thought follows another, a work follows a rest that precedes a work. Death comes quickly, and that’s what this little pile of dust on the corner of my suitcase is telling me.

I remember a text from my teacher who spoke of an experience of fundamental shock. One of his teachers had said to him: “In a hundred years, all the people you know will be dead and gone”. It was such a shock to him that he remained in a state of stupefaction for several days, in an immediate understanding of the extreme impermanence of our lives.

Then I see this dust accumulated in the corner of my suitcase, which is like a symbol, a reminder that everything undergoes the cycle of corruption, goes through the cycle of life and death, and I tell myself that I too am already dying.

And that there has been an accumulation of generations of people who have died and that the generations have accumulated like this dust on the suitcase.