This is a translation from my Italian fiction Quante ore ci sono in un metro? I have to thank Writingforevs87 for the betareading of this English translation that enabled me to publish it.
DECLARATION: The title is a line from the quote of C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed at the end of the fiction. The "saying" from Tatooine is actually a paraphrase by Nietzsche's line.
This afternoon you have decided to escape from your hospital room. You can't stand the droid's care anymore, both medical and protocol ones. You can't stand anymore the well-meaning comrades, who want to "cheer you up". You can't stand anymore the inquisitive officers, who want to hear the story of "the boy survived at the duel with Vader". Above all, in spite that you are sad to admit it, you can't stand Leia's solicitudes anymore.
You are aware that's just unfair to her, because she's doing her best to ease your staying in hospital, as you wait for the operation to plant the prosthesis. She cares for you and probably she also needs to fuss over someone to forget her sorrows. But you can't just "speak about it" or "share it" or "tell her" to "get over the trauma". She's worried for you, but she doesn't understand that her insistence won't make things easier. On the contrary. At this point, her mere presence distresses you and sometimes you really need time, silence, loneliness.
After deceiving the droid, you could find this empty room with this window, large enough to watch all the Galaxy revolving from this Outer Rim, where Admiral Ackbar has hidden the Alliance's fleet. You sat down on the floor with the wall as back and now you are admiring this sight.
It seems so peaceful with the star spiral in its rotation. From here, you couldn't tell the Empire's oppression or the war. Yet, how many billions of small and big tragedies are happening just now in the midst of star light? How many billions of beings are being born and how many are dying? How many vicissitudes are developing, all of them important for their protagonists, but at the same time insignificant for the endless motion of the Galaxy?
Even your problems seem to fade into nothing. You're nothing comparing the infinity, whether in space or in time. And if you are nothing, then also your concerns, your fights and your anguishes are nothing. Even just for that, you'd watch it forever. But there's more – much more. The Galaxy is tremendously wonderful to watch. A human being's mind can be annihilated by it.
More than once, Master Yoda urged you to meditate in front of some nature sights, to contemplate the majesty of the Force, who gives it life and holds it together. He taught you how to do, you did and it was wonderful to immerse yourself into the Force's deepness. Yet, you have meditated no more since you left Dagobah. You know you should and you feel guilty. In this moment, it'd be the best help for your wounds, both the physical and emotional ones. Probably you aren't just guilty, you are a little foolish too.
When you were on Dagobah, it seemed to you so easy to think at the Force's immensity. But now it's different. Now you feel powerless and too dirty for a meditation. You'd almost wish the Force touched you first and constrained you to feel it against your feeble will. Yet, you know it won't be like that. The Force is powerful, but discreet: it doesn't impose itself, because it waits to be touched. That's the only way: a mere gush of its power in a fragile soul, not predisposed to received it, would probably destroy the poor creature's mind.
Moving an object is comparatively easy, even for you, who's surely aren't a master. It's like "borrow" on the sly an infinitesimal bit of its energy to your own small purpose. But touching the Force to contemplate is different. The idea of admiring its full power is for the mind like wanting to look at Tatooine suns for the eyes: you can't remain undamaged.
Yet, if you really want to be earnest with yourself, you must admit that isn't the only reason of your reluctance to meditate now. There's an other one, you aren't proud of at all: you are aware you can't meditate, if aren't ready to wholly accept whatever the Force will show you, even the possible vision of your future. You are ashamed of this reason, because you are aware how foolish it is. You are aware you won't escape in any way from what was preordained and nevertheless the Force will constrain willy-nilly you to your destiny. You can only choose whether you will fulfil it in the easy way with your good will or in the hard one, compelled like a stupid, stubborn dewback by lashes. Your common sense suggests you must meditate, seeking the Force's will to accomplish it as a free man. But you haven't been able to throw faithfully yourself on the Force's ways, since you found Vader on your path.
You had better to stay focused on the Galaxy sight, because the smallest thought about the masked man makes you to forget immediately the chief systems and brings you back to your present miseries. You lean your head back, on the cold metal wall, and your face twists in a grimace: your stump begins to itch again. With your remaining hand, you rub softly on the bandage. An intense sting rises and you regret immediately you haven't endured the itching. You close your eyes as the pain grows and its apex takes your breath away. Then finally it begins to fade into the continuous tingle of these days and you can breath again.
You look forward to the operation free you by this torment. You look forward to have a shower. You look forward to dress yourself without help. You look forward to do your every day activities. You look forward to have something to do, in order to distract your mind from your thoughts. You look forward to touch a X-Wing cloche. You look forward to feel again the freedom of flying.
"You must wait a few more days, sir," the doctor told you again this morning. "I can't say how many. I know I already told you the same yesterday. But I must check the progress day after day. Such things are like that: you must be patient."
Patience has never been your strongest point.
You bow your head to look at your stump and carefully you pull it on your chest, beginning to massage softly what remains of your forearm with your other hand. You shouldn't think about it, because the more you think about it, the more it itches and stings. But the more you think you shouldn't think about it, the more you actually think about it and the mere idea of just an other hour like that becomes an agony.
"He will learn patience," Ben prophesied.
Surely you will… in the way of a stupid, stubborn dewback! A sort of a sad self-deprecating smile grows on your lips.
"Patience! Be patient! You must learn to be patient! You aren't patient!" How many times were you lectured like that in your life? By Aunt Beru, by Uncle Owen, by the teacher of the Anchorhead Small School, by Ben, by Master Yoda… even General Rieekan humorously told you once. You heard that so many times that it became just a background noise not to care.
Yet you're learning now. Willy-nilly. But the lesson is merciless.
You close your eyes, stop to rub your arm and with the fingertips you pick up among the eyelashes a tear, that menaces to fall. Then, you stroke you hair once, sighing.
Oh, Force! Why this endless agony? Why can't you make an end of being what you are? Not just a hand, but half of yourself should be cut away, so that you could cease to be Vader's son.
Why did it happen? Was it all a coincidence? Or was everything preordained and there was nothing you could do to avoid it? Or, on the contrary, were your choices to cause the events? And if so, what did you do so evil to deserve all this?
Could the wish to save your friends be a fault? You left your training against your masters' will, a soft voice whispers. But, how could the Force put you into this dilemma: your friends or your training? Love or duty? It was a trap without the right option – you'd have got wrong anyway.
Why you?
You look for an answer you can't find, but a new question rises: why shouldn't it have happened to you? Who has never fallen into disgrace? For the only reason to be born, every creature is condemned to die. Life brings tragedy as addition. Why did you deceive yourself, thinking you were different?
You'd like to object: why exactly this tragedy? Yet, thinking better, you agree it's a nonsense question. Indeed, there are many kind of tragedies: the small and the huge ones, the natural ones and those caused by other sentient beings, those that were expected and those that weren't. But does it really make sense to compile the "disgrace level list" and to complain: "I'd prefer this one" or "I'd prefer this other one"? Truth is no one would want to experience any disgrace at all in his own life.
So, why the Force creates life, if then it destroys it? Or it is, as if to say, a "part-time" Force: it can create life, but not sustain it?
Yet, you are aware life never really ends. You saw Ben's ghost. You are sure you didn't dream of him. You are sure he was him. But he was a blurry vision, that didn't show a lot of what there's after the threshold. It was sufficient to hope, but not enough to understand. And, above all, it hasn't freed you from the fear of death.
You were afraid to die so often during the war, but before Bespin there had never been a moment in which you had really thought you were going actually to die. During dogfights or ground combats (and even in the cave in Hoth), you held always the hope to be faster and more lucky than your opponent and you were too busy to care about death. Had the fatal blow come, you wouldn't have probably had even the time to realize that.
But while you were falling in the Bespin shaft, you were absolutely sure you were going to die into a few moments. Then a whirlwind of questions flooded in your mind; they were vague in your state of agitation, yet so clear in substance, even if not in the rational form: "How painful will my body's damage process be? Will I feel the spirit to separate? Will I awoke somewhere else or is this just the end of everything?" Yes, you asked that too, in spite the vision of Ben's ghost.
Will the fear of death vanish, going on your training, or it's a part of human nature that you will never be able to wholly eradicate? Maybe it's just your fault and your laziness': if you meditated every day, the steady feeling of the Force would make you wish to become one with it.
You quiver. You wonder if the enduring feeling of fear of these last days will never leave you.
All people around you scare you. You are afraid they will find out somehow your guarded secret. What would the Alliance do with Vader's son? A wall of suspicion was built between you and everybody else and you image threats everywhere: every time you bump into a glance, you wonder whether it's distrustful; every time you heard a buzz, you wonder whether it's about you. Your relationships with other people seem to be as usual, but you feel alone also in company of your dearest friends. Even with Leia you aren't completely comfortable. You feel as if you bore an inborn deficiency. Rather, you do bear an inborn deficiency – half of yourself is corrupt by a malicious source.
And while you are running away even from the shadows, ironically your fame as hero grows: you faced Vader in duel, receiving just the amputation of your hand. Your comrades admire you, Alliance leaders entertain ambitions for their "new Jedi". But you are aware you deserve neither admirations or ambitions. You know why you are alive and it isn't a reason you are proud of. What will it happen to all hopes are being placing on you, when truth will be known? What will it happen, when it will be revealed that you are the son of the man all of the Galaxy dreads?
That you dread above everything else. You dread that Vader will go on hunting you for the rest of your life, that you will be given no quarter, living always in his aim. But if you want really to be earnest, you must acknowledge that perhaps you dread much more that wouldn't happen. In the most hidden place of your heart, the doubt that your father can't estimate you worth of his interest drives you mad. You dread to be abandoned by him again, now that you rejected his proposal at Bespin. But what else could you do? You would do so much to know him (and to have some answers). Yet you can't damn your soul for him, repudiating the true nature of the Force.
Maybe that would do credit to you, if in this moment you weren't actually dreading even the Force and of finding out what it's storing for you. Ben's assertion that chance doesn't exist and that everything happens for a purpose doesn't seem to you so comforting anymore. Rather it seems cruel to you. "What does not kill you makes you stronger" is said on Tatooine. But now, you feel weaker – a part of yourself was shattered forever and you are afraid to find out what else the Force is planning for you. Or did you hit the ground and now you can just go back up?
Yet "you were lucky". Everybody tells you that these days: you survived in a duel with Vader, you caught an antenna while falling, The Millennium Falcon was back in time to save you, the hyperdrive was repaired soon enough… All signs of fate, your friends say. But you think bitterly that maybe they are all twists of fate – you should have died in Bespin, with that part of yourself that went forever. But weren't you who grasped so firm the antenna? Weren't you who called out for help, instead of let you go definitively? You dreaded death in Bespin. Now you dread life.
You don't even know how you will go back to Yoda. How will you tell him you can't meditate anymore? And what could your master answer, after you disobeyed him? He told you not to suspend your training and now you feel ashamed to go back like that. You'd like going back Dagobah after coming to your sense a little more, even if in this moment you doubt that will ever happen.
You shake your head, smiling bitterly.
You feel like a child again: after you had gone in big troubles and your uncle had beat you good, you always sought refuge in a solitary place. You hid and, waiting for the shame of your disobedience fading, you put your messed feelings into order.
You tried to overcome the feeling of helplessness for a disgrace that seemed always fell on you all of a sudden. It didn't matter if you had been warned once, twice, three (…thousand!) times you hadn't been behaving. When at last you paid the consequences, it always seemed to you that it was an unexpected circumstance, with no cause-and-effect connections. Rather you was incredulous that the person, who usually fed, raised and protected you, seemed to become some else for a few minutes. So, you got angry for what you always judged if not an entirely unfair punishment, at least a surely exaggerate one. And you end up to daydream your father would have been more understanding and forgiving. But why would that have to be true? At the time, you didn't wonder and now you see there wasn't one single reason. The harsh truth is teaching you to distinguish between reason and wish.
You touch your still bruised cheekbone.
How many times were you slapped for having disobeyed? "Rebel boy!", your uncle yelled between one smack and the next. "Will you learn to do as I tell you?!"
Rebel!
You can always try to put it in this way: basically, at Bespin you were just beaten much harder because of a much bigger rebellion. In the end, isn't everything less horrible, if you think it like that? In some way, your father (you swallow the lump in your throat) didn't try to kill you, but just to teach you the lesson he thought necessary to bring you to his side…
A foolish idea begins to mold into your mind.
A far too foolish idea: Sith don't go around the Galaxy to look for their lost children, but they want to lure potential apprentices; Sith don't spare their sons' life, they just failed to kill Jedi. You try to forget your foolish idea, but it's harder than you think and you bet you put it aside just for a while. That annoys you, because you wish it disappeared as you have never thought it.
You look again at your stump with nausea. You haven't got used to it and you wonder if you will really able to, when you will have the prosthesis. If you had a moment of indecision about Vader's real reasons, now you refuse it angrily: you weren't just beaten (brutally), you were also crippled. That makes a lot of difference.
But where was the Force when you, shaken by an intolerable agony, saw your hand be torn off by your body forever? Wasn't it with your father? You felt his power during your duel and you can't surely deny the Force was more prodigal with him than with you. Is the Force on his side? Has it allowed all this, because it wants you to turn to the dark side? No, you can't really believe that. As much as you are confused and despondent, even if you can't meditate anymore like before, at the heart of your soul you know the Force's will leads to the righteousness. If now you can't see what this righteousness is, it doesn't mean that doesn't exist anymore. It just means you can't focus that at the moment, because of your unbearable sorrow.
"Unbearable": you heard this word so often. Among tears of people who confided, you heard qualifying unbearable grieves, wounds, tortures.
And now, it's your turn. It was unbearable the moment of your maiming. It was unbearable the fear of death during your fall. It's unbearable the idea of Vader being your father.
Yet you begin to wonder if this word means really something. In fact, it assumes some activity by us, that we can do or we can't. Ideas of "bearable" and "unbearable" require we are the subject of our predicament. Yet, the protagonist is actually the pain that wears us out and we are just the inert object of its activity. When we say "our predicament is unbearable", we are just affirming our dread to find us violated, not more in control, totally at the mercy of events. It's just human and understandable that happens to common people, but you wonder whether this is good also for a Jedi. Shouldn't the latter know that every occurrence is predestined by the Force? Shouldn't he live in the unshakable faith about the goodness and purpose of each way it prepares, even that one he can just suffer?
Do you believe that? And so, why you can't endure what has come on you? Are you now guilty for lack of faith in the Force or were you guilty for naivety, when you thought it predestined your life at best?
Maybe you don't suit to be a Jedi, because you can't see anymore the basis on which you should build your life. Perhaps you should leave your training at all, go back your normal service in your squadron and forget Dagobah. This is an appealing idea and it isn't the first time you think about it.
But you also know it's unrealistic. You touched the Force, you felt it flow, you meditated on its greatness, you experienced the goodness of its ways. At the heart of your soul, you know you don't regret that joyful experiences, but the delusion because you aren't able to do them now. In this moment you can just go on, willy-nilly, because there isn't a way back: the experiences in the Force have already changed you and you can't be again the person you were before. If you couldn't complete your training, you shouldn't have started it from the very beginning and you should have been satisfied of whom you were. Yet, you don't feel as you had a real choice. You were born with the gift to feel the Force, you didn't choose it. That's it who chose you. And till now, that made you happy and proud. But you didn't actually understand that, when the Force choose you, your responsibilities don't diminish, rather they increase.
The unmentionable grudge now you feel against the Force, because of a destiny you judge unfair, postulates in itself that you deem its ways are fair and right. If the Force didn't exist, how could you resent it? If you didn't believe its ways are always right, would it make sense to complain because your destiny seems so bad?
So you are at logical impasse. If the Force exists, if its ways are always right, then it's fair and right that you are a monster's son and you have been crippled by him. But this result is unacceptable. Or is it unacceptable just for you? If it wasn't absolutely unacceptable, but just for you, this would mean you are merely rebel to the Force's ways and the lesson you were taught would be fair, as the slaps your uncle dealt you were usually well deserved and just your pride of spoilt little brat didn't allow you to admit that.
But neither this result makes sense: till Bespin, you had never thought the Force's ways couldn't be right. Justice requires that rebellion causes punishment: if it happens in reverse, what's the logic? Or the Force, who controls everything, having already known what was in your heart, put you in a unintelligible predicament, so that your rebellion would show and you could acknowledge it?
Then the Force would have tried you, knowing you wouldn't pass, so that you can now confess your lack of faith. And now? Now you are supposed to be purified from your sin. But, how can you do it now that you are doubtful, if you couldn't do in the past, when you felt a firmer faith? Can a weak, but authentic faith succeed, where a stronger, but hypocrite one failed?
Will you find answers in your future or is it good for you not to understand some mysteries of this life?
"Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that."
(C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed)