Yesterday someone posted on FB the video of a Ukrainian pianist, Karina Manyukina, playing Chopin's Étude Op. 25 No. 1. In addition to a heavenly music played with deep sadness, what surrounded the pianist was her house destroyed by a bomb. All around her, I could see remnants of doors and windows and broken glass that had accumulated in piles of garbage, making it impossible to move around the rooms without tripping over them. By some miracle, the piano had been left intact. It was a white piano now covered in dust. Listening to the artist perform Chopin's music among the ruins of her house gave me an unavoidable sense of hopelessness. Is this the world in which we live, a world where often those who lack sanity are the ones on stage? The scene of Karina Manyukina performing beautiful music amid the grime of a war based on madness presented the two faces of an incomprehensible world: on the one hand, that of a magnificent melody, but on the other the death of innocent children and civilians. At night, after watching the video, I dreamed I was in a dark room from which I heard a killer approaching. Despite locking the door, I knew the thug would open it. Today, I can’t avoid wondering about the meaning of living on a planet where those of us who feel human compassion can’t do anything to protect those who suffer. Without a doubt, Karina Manyukina's video generated for me a difficult existential problem that I now have to solve one way or another: is it true then what some philosophers have said that life is an absurd journey between birth and death, or is there an explanation for human evil that our mind has not yet discovered?
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