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January 8, 2006
This description of Adelaide in the summertime heat indicates why I have an affinity with the Heidegger of dread, anxiety and existential crisis:
It was February and 40 degrees. I looked outside through the full-sized smokey balcony: an abandoned fruit market, scorching tarmac, not a soul in the street, empty vague buildings and above them, a mercilessly still sky, meltingly grey-blue. It took my breath away. I could not cope with this, this emptiness without a sense of time or a feeling of space to give a meaningful framework to what I saw. [...] There too it was Sunday afternoon, about four o'clock, and I thought that something would snap in my head and start bleeding and make me crazy forever, so confused and empty and without meaning did I feel.
Only a fool would go onto the streets in the searing heat of 40 degrees during a heat storm when the north wind is blowing hard down from the desert. if you you have a sense of nothing
And the houses are not much better----especially when the airconditioner has packed it in, like ours. Today is a scorcher. It is a bare life, period.
Nothing is what produces in us a feeling of dread (angst}. That this deep feeling of dread is a most fundamental human indication of human life isexperienced in Adelaide in summertime. It reminds us that we know that we will die (as many seniors do) , and so the concern with our annihilation (from fire or heat exhaustion) is an ever-present feature of human experience.
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