The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.
From Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco's The Age of Perversion:
Our own existence as conscious animals seems a mere chance occurrence in a vast, overwhelming, mysterious, and impenetrable universe. Yet we hunger for being and life even as we know certain annihilation awaits us. As a spider weaves its web from its own body, we weave our world from the body of our experience, never fully knowing who or what we are or who or what anyone else is. We play our roles, trying to get what we want and perhaps giving others what they want, dealing as best as we can with the conflict that arises when individual desires cross swords. We unfold into life and eventually enfold back into ourselves and die. Like a spider suspended on the slenderest of silken filaments, we hover throughout our existence above the abyss, tethered to life by the thread of our breath, repressing the terror of that certain knowledge. Existence itself as such is already an excessive trauma, and the limit that is one’s death – a complete and final castration – is symbolized in every limit, every loss and every heartbreak. A profound hunger, in every sense of the word, haunts the human creature, who must seek satisfaction in its war with limitation and loss.
