To every thing there is a season, and a time to every
purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a
time to pluck up that which is planted;
(…) A time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.
This vision of life as a cycle can be distorting and wrong.
There are many other views in which life doesn’t spread out
as a cycle but as one damn thing after another, or as an
erratic snake, or as the coloured joy of a bird in spring.
But there is in fact a certain angle where life and its
elements show up to us in a circular way, where love and war
follow on from each other with regularity along time. There
is a view in which the Ecclesiastes author is right.
Think of our everyday life, and its wars: the work war, the
survival war. Isn’t there, in the interval of our daily
wars, a space – perhaps brief, too brief – for a smile, for
a calm conversation, for a kiss? There is indeed always an
hour, a minute, to love. There is a cycle of war and love in
our lives. And Ecclesiastes is right, in this view.
Even those responsible for wars, in the strict sense of the
word, aren’t excluded from this cycle. Even those whose
hands are dirty with blood – as the Nazis – need a space for
loving their children, their spouses, their lovers (yet it
may be considered as wretched and insignificant in face of
the space dedicated to war and hate).
We all are involved in these cycles. In fact, what varies
within the repeating cycles of our lives is the duration of
the spaces they contain. In the better of us the space for
the superior or for the good acts may be bigger. But in them
there is also a large space for repetitive daily things, and
for the evil present in the roots of every being. And that’s
another perspective of seeing human’s lives as cycles.
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