Horror vacui

Life is filled with richness and filled with beings. Everything has rules and plans and meaning that we discover each day. In nature there is also a void; things we can’t explain or that don’t have meaning. Then we realize that we don’t like those things because of the lack everything. Emptiness is always lurking around.

Philosophy has talked about these problems since we don’t like emptiness. Astronomers have discovered black holes which represent voids in space that suck everything around. Math has the concept of 0 (zero) that seems to have no value. Music has its moments of silence that enrich the piece but silence alone seems ridiculous. In Art, there are trends that can’t deal with spaces without ornaments like the Baroque and Rococo styles that cramp every space available with a detail that shows us the richness and vastness of the spaces. There is minimalism but still, we add a meaning to it to cope with the emptiness we can’t face.

Nowadays we still live in the “horror vacui”, the fear of having empty spaces in our lives, and by that, I mean being alone. Loneliness is like that emptiness that we run away from and we fill those moments with noise, music, photos, people that avoid us to comfort ourselves. We may fear emptiness because there is nothing else to see, think, feel but ourselves and in that mirror, we may not like what we see. Silence, nothingness, meaningless things, emptiness, show us who we are, then why are we so afraid of them?