The shock of the unknown

A person’s inclination to expose himself to the shock of the unknown is a secret and cherished sensation, which says much about the quality of such a person. There are those who ignore it, and those who cannot resist it. In any event it is an archaic vestige. In a very remote age, before prehistory, that sensation was a constant experience. Today its presence is felt when we approach a site of ruins, one of those silent and enclosed places that evoke the past through fragments of stone. Many visitors want or love or expect to be accompanied there by guides or audio guides. Others wander such places as though blind. They will see the place—if they ever see it at all—only through what they have recorded through a lens. And above all, what they see again will be themselves.

Then there are those who simply look. Among these few, there are some—a meager sect—determined to lay themselves open to the shock of the unknown. They know it to be an invaluable sensation and preliminary to all connection with the past. That sensation is like the first stage of a rite of initiation that takes place in darkness and silence. But it is essential in order to establish a relationship with the unknown. Which, in the case of the past, is above all absence. Ruins bear witness to this: that the past is not there. Having once absorbed this shock, which penetrates deep into the veins, the process of knowledge can then—slowly, gradually—begin. Great historians are necromancers—and so too are visitors. They have all undergone that initial experience, which keeps happening again, even if their physiologies may be very different: austere, as in the case of Burckhardt—or visionary, as with Michelet.

Digitability is the gravest infliction for those inclined to lay themselves open to the shock of the unknown. That sensation was cultivated by few, like a secret. But the Web has obliged everyone to assume a vast weight of learning that they do not know, as though engulfed from every direction by an uninterrupted and instructive whir. A Google Earth extended over time suffocates any perception of the unknown, which is inevitably mitigated and weakened—or eventually neutralized.

Roberto Calasso
Unnameable Present