Vertiginously close? Can proximity cause vertigo?
It can. When the North Pole comes so close as to touch the South Pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spins and beckons him to fall.
If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgement for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin’s son ran up to the electrified wire and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of a scared sticking pitifully up in the air, lifted by the infinite lightness of a world that has lost its dimensions.
Stalin’s son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The Germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country’s territory to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country’s power to the west —yes, they died for something idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning of general validity. Amid the general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin’s son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.
