Page 156 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

156 from Italy to the Canary Islands

Revealing one’s identity. But let us return to sailors: their practical targets,
their profit, and yet we are not fully convinced by all these ideas. There
must be something else: there is something else.
In “taking on” the ocean, in setting sail, necessarily encountering dan-
gers and putting one’s life at risk, and then there are the projects, the con-
quests and the acquisitions, which do not strike us as adequate factors.
The sailor speaks of horizons according to the phases of the day (dawn,
morning, afternoon, evening, night) and therefore crosses them, examines
them with an expert eye, supported by experts with suitable instruments,
but at times of calm, when the ship drifts on the water with difficulty, this
is when (reflecting alone, in silence, in his casket below deck) his thoughts
move casually from the horizons to the word “horizon”. In a certain sense,
he is going backwards, but perhaps it is progress, moving forward even if
he has descended to the singular.
Horizon.
Because what else is, in its substance, putting to sea? History books
recount facts and therefore sailors have their own niche, where their path
of birth and death and then all their actions are clear; there can be no escha-
tological aspects, which are instead embraced in texts of the Philosophy of
Being or in a more specific Philosophy of Man.
To quench his thirst for the unknown, man takes action, puts to sea or
undertakes another feat and takes on the unknowable; we should always
bear this metaphysical factor in mind, otherwise, everything would seem
like a challenge, a fight, a desire to be great, vanity. We know that this is
not only the case and that it is right to possess a light in writing which
clarifies the facts.
Yes, back to light.
We were speaking of the great ability of the owl to penetrate darkness
and open up the way ahead for itself at night. The owl is like a light which
scrutinises, absorbs data and takes action: a job in itself if it wants to live
and defend itself. But is it not amazing that it has to appear and take action
at night, of all times? Do owls also distinguish between horizon and hori-
zons? The owl has its importance in our essay; we have not called it onto
the scene, because it possesses the quality, the “extravagance” of being
a nocturnal animal, and we have likened it, as an image, to a light which
sheds light on mystery.
Of course, the owl has very good reasons for being here: if the mathe-
matician/philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein states that language is the Be-