U-chodzić

Abstract

The book looks for its sources in a vision of life as essaying, that is in a conviction that being of the human individual and the world is fundamentally unstable and not ready and, despite various pressures exerted by the organized forms of life, it shelters within itself a dark „rest”, a restance, of which Hamlet says that it belongs to „silence”. This strange reticence from which our life originates is, paradoxically, the muteness of death. To retreat is to essay to consider life in all its seriousness in its connection with death and passing away; the profound consciousness of finitude constitutes human life. Reading such authors as H.D. Thoreau, J.J. Rousseau, Franz Kafka, W.G. Sebald, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Friedrich Nietzsche we try to present re-treating as an indispensible effort to escape the hegemonic, social, philosophical, aesthetic structures which regulate our lives. The man of re-treat, the walking, ambulatory and ambulating man, is the man of the „rest”, a peripheral being of a „larger, more serious work”, always exposed to the world and trying to regain what Stefan Symotiuk has called „immediate tactile-mobile connection with biological and physical matter”. Hence, the duty of the ambulating man of re-treat is to save what he/ she has seen. The world refuses to be brought down just to „one blind and deaf point”. The connection with death which is at the core of human life must also be conceived of as a protest against reality disappearing for ever. Nothing should be more precious to us abandoned to our earthly destiny than the task of defending the world from vanishing. We must and will pass away in the act of the ultimate re-treat, such is the course of the nature of things, but we have been given a mission of saving the world as an admirable community of the human and non-human, a modality which by far transcends the borders and limitations of the conscious subject.