“The eternal enters and leaves Appearing, just as the sun—which shines eternal — enters and leaves the vault of the sky”: A neo-Parmenidean thought and some photos of Mill Road Cemetery

Today has been a day of contemplating, in one way or another, Emanuele Severino’s neo-Parmenidean point that outside the  “essential alienation” that comes with our European civilization’s belief that “the thing is that which issues from and returns to nothingness” (Emanuele Severino, The Essence of Nihilism, Verso Books, 2016, p. 15)

“. . . that which appears is being — immutable, the eternal. The eternal enters and leaves Appearing, just as the sun — which shines eternal — enters and leaves the vault of the sky. When being leaves the vault of what appears, Appearing keeps silent about the fate of the being that is hidden (and “when” assumes an unheard-of-meaning). But the Erinyes (Dikes epikouroi) of whom Heraclitus speaks (Fr. 94) catch up with what is hidden and remind it of its destiny: the Necessity, the Ananke that it remain united to its Being” (ibid. p. 32).

Here I don’t propose to explicate in any way Severino’s words but all I will say is that as I walked around Mill Road Cemetery this afternoon with my camera, and as I also reflected on the experience of saying prayers yesterday evening with a dying man and his family, my meditations were fully centred on the utterly radical implications the preceding paragraph has for us.

But of course there is absolutely no need fully to understand or grasp these implications to enjoy the photos below.

All taken with a Fuji X100F

Just click on a photo to enlarge it