Is it better to speak or to die?
- Jun 17
- 4 min read
To speak or to die?
This philosophical question is the core of one of the best books, and subsequent films ever made – Call me by your name.
If you have lived under a rock or haven’t yet indulged in this brilliant piece of cinematography let me be the first to sell it to you.
I watched it once at the ripe age of sixteen and was left feeling an overwhelming sense of existentialism. Set in Crema, Northern Italy it explores the destructive, transformative, and eternal power of a first love. One of the only films to cause me to question my sense of self.
Four years after watching I’m finally heading to the motherland myself (Crema) which has obviously led me back to the mindblowing catalytic question itself…
To speak:
To verbalise the contents of one's mind is one of life’s most vulnerable processes. Letting someone crawl in between the crevices of your brain, weaving in and out of a continual stream of your consciousness. A web of one's deepest desires and biggest fears un-impacted by the entitlement of opinion. Perhaps the only way to holistically know someone is to entwine yourself within the creases of their thoughts. Sometimes I myself struggle to decipher my own thoughts, and are they even mine to speak or have I involuntarily re-written from others before me? Whoever’s they are should they be spoken?
Thoughts are free to wander within the ephemeral playground of the mind. Some cling to walls and last a lifetime, adding to our sense of self, although they may never leave the vessel of the body. Others are birthed into the world through a misjumbled flurry, instantaneously regretted. To speak is to give up ownership of these words. No longer confined within the four walls of the mind, or within the limitless confines of pen and paper, they become open to the misinterpretation and misunderstanding of verbalisation.
It would be a shame to never speak, but to articulate the emotions and sensations of my soul seems often too much of a feat. To never speak would be a waste, but to spend a life translating one's soul for having spoken would be a much worse fate.
To die:
Death is supposedly the end of one's life. However to die is only for the body to cease living, the soul goes on eternally, and in doing so one can never truly die. Unaffected by the confines of humanity our souls will weave through the world, causing those unexplainable moments when you shiver for no reason, when you feel the briefest brush against the skin with nothing beside you – these are the souls of those before us, and we will join them when our fleeting time within this ‘life’ is complete.
Life is eternal in this sense, so long as you believe it is, we can transcend the limitations of mere life and death when we go back to the elementary concept that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. No matter what happens within the wonderful confines of life it all has to end. Comforting in times of hardship, and frightening when things are serendipitous.
To answer the question at hand would be to explore choosing death, and in doing so would be to cut off the natural order of your being. Thousands of thoughts, memories, experiences and connections left incomplete and fragmented. Life is a momentary gift and to end it before it has naturally ended would lead only to an expedited eternal existence of living within one's soul, external to the human body.
Conclusion:
Life ends with death, and is filled with an abundance of speech. To choose death and cut this abundance short would be to skip to the final page of a book before having read the beginning. A thought dies once it has left the mouth of its protector, so in a way to speak can be to die, but to die would be to cease speaking altogether – and that would be the truest tragedy of all.
Our time on earth is a blip between centuries of those before us, we will be forgotten in a hundred years, as have those before us. This does not negate the need for your existence, in fact it gives you purpose. You need not speak with perfection, you need not speak with confidence, you need purely to speak.
To choose death would not be to die, to choose death would only be choosing a near identical existence for a perpetual period of time, which seems foolish given how exceptionally rare our time on earth is.
Whoever you are, wherever you are from. It requires bravery and courage to speak, but our life was not given to us to simply die. Speak before the inevitability of death catches up to you, speak before one day the unpredictability of life untimely ends.
With love,
Mimi x
IG: @itswithlovemimi TIKTOK: @mimipiqua SUBSTACK: @mimipiqua
Comments