I guess it’s a common evil and there are expressions, fillers or catchphrases that bother us especially. The tiresome, do you understand me? with which people who do not always make themselves understood end almost all their sentences and other similar or equivalent forms of language. Based on, how could it be otherwise, and period, okay, you know, as I say… to give you some examples of the ones that leave my spirits altered. But since linguistic sensitivity goes by skins and by neighborhoods, I don’t want to get more purist than it should be, so it’s better to let each person speak as it comes out of their throat and contribute to their cultural and personal portrait in the process.
However, and as magnanimous as I feel, lately – I mean throughout these convulsive years – the phrase go to the end is used and abused intolerably. And there are countless examples in which some politician affirms that in this or that situation he will go to the end, often with the tagline of assuming all the consequences, whatever they may be. Aragonès asks that the wiretapping investigation be carried through to the end. And we cannot help but add: and whoever falls falls. And Laura Borràs or Quim Torra were going to get to the end in various circumstances. In fact, it is almost a cry of independence to go to the end, which, presumably, can only be independence itself.
If the little phrase squeaks me, it is precisely because of its forcefulness, empty of reality. In this existence our living is surviving. And the only certain end is death. So invoking that he will go to the end is like appropriating the palm of martyrdom very early. Even more so when there is a war going on in Eastern Europe, in which there are people who, in effect, are going to the end in their actions. Ukraine today is not only an uchrony, a story that seems deviated from history, it is also an immoral lesson in death and destruction. To a certain extent, the war on Ukrainian soil is the Spanish civil war of this generation of Westerners, who continue to see how the end comes to others while we participate in death by intervening people and weapons. These are not times to be too proud of ourselves. And there are no principles before these endings.
Modestly or immodestly, I am not sure, I would ask that we leave aside the tagline of going to the end, because that end never comes for those who aspire to prolong their position, position and exercise of power. And when it happens it is because it has gone to a very different end from the one proclaimed. Qui dia pasa, any empeny, of course, and from end to end, the story never ends. Getting to the end, when you don’t know what the destination of the trip is or have too much notion of what it means, is nothing more than a toast to the sun, an emphatic phrase to hide nothing. It is a significant empty of meaning, which strips and leaves in question the firmness that it pretends to pretend. An imposture.
Pure theater of the absurd, as in the dialogue with which Samuel Beckett closes his Waiting for Godot. Vladimir says to Estragon: “So, shall we go?” And he replies: “Yes, let’s go.” And the Irish author leaves a final note in this scene, which indicates: “Both characters remain still.”
And there yes, while the actors remain motionless, the curtain falls and it is, truly, the end of the performance. Soon the theater is empty.
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