The things we love and existence

From: Muhamedin Kullashi

The great French poet and thinker, Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), writes in the book "The Unfinished" (Paris, 2021) that "the things we love, as a place of our existence, are not a matter but still the very being or the way of of our being, as potential and possibility or as an act."

He sees the selection and cultivation of the place and environment where we live as closely related to our readings and reflections on ourselves and the world. Reflections and meditations are enriched with the poetic approach that we find in the works of Dante, Baudelaire, Heidegger, etc.

To be in the world means to adopt the place where you live and the moments of the present as your residence, with the thoughts, images and feelings that you have created by researching the philosophical and poetic works (in the original meaning "poièsis" not only as a literary genre but as creativity). Such living space makes it possible, says Bonnefoy, to shape a place of existence: a space that helps "structure experiences" from the past and from the present. These reflections on life and the world must be developed within the "thought on finitude", i.e. accompanied by the awareness that human existence unfolds in the horizon of finitude and not in that of eternity.

In these mental and poetic researches of Bonnefoy, the influence of Heidegger's philosophical-poetic thought is clearly dictated...