Maurice Blanchot writes the prose piece L'instant de ma mort, or, The Instant of My Death, concerning "a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his death. ... The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses." [1]
There remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer to come, the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? the infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond. I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if death outside him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. "I am alive. No, you are dead."
I don't know if I just find this interesting and I am honestly too tired and too overwhelmed with the constraints of life today to properly think about this brief text. Galatians 2:20-21 comes to mind.
[1] so says the back cover of the text In the Instant of My Death, Maurice Blanchot, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Jacques Derrida, Stanford University Press (ISBN 0-8047-3326-0), 2000.
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