Italian
Even having a thousand reasons not to do it. Literally, it means to immerse oneself in a foul-smelling sludge populated by rats and various insects, a place from which one does not emerge healthy, if one manages to get out alive. It is where waste accumulates, of all kinds. Civilized people keep their distance from these places, even though they exist because they are necessary. On the other hand, waste has to be collected somewhere.
Lives universally defined as exemplary, or that would have the conditions to be so, are deliberately lost in this muck, stale and shapeless. Some for a short time, others remain stuck or even drown in it. Let’s say this is the fate of unfortunate souls who, due to vice or excessive virtue, end up like this: excluded, abandoned, forgotten.
They are the hidden stains of those who consider themselves and want to be seen as “good people,” or the “black holes” from which one ends up being sucked into a bottomless vortex. In my work as a doctor and psychiatrist, I have been, and still am, a witness to many people who have presented this issue and have sought help, and, if that is not feasible, at least relief. So why get “bogged down,” when one could, by not doing so, live peacefully?
There is, it is true, an attraction towards losing oneself and self-destruction, as a natural and pathological aspect. Freud said that alongside the pleasure principle, which drives man to live, there is also a death instinct, which pushes him not to live.
But we must acknowledge that by “getting our hands dirty” — an expression that resembles the word “to get bogged down” in both literal and symbolic meaning — we can achieve not only concrete advantages but also “spiritual” recognition. The Latins used to say e malo bonum, good comes from evil, or, in a more contemporary way, “not all evil comes to harm.”
Only through the descent into the underworld, like Ulysses, Aeneas, and Dante, does knowledge enrich, truth is discovered, and salvation is achieved. The word hospital comes from hospes, a place in ancient times designated to host, to provide shelter and food to those who were abandoned, destitute, and sick. In the past, they were places of welcome for the poorest, who were cared for and tended by good souls.
Those who, out of compassion, chose to abandon comfort to dedicate themselves to the least, for free. Saint Camillus was a remarkable example of this in the early 17th century. And like him, other Saints and Blessed ones.
They were people who, like other volunteers today, “get their hands dirty.” St. Camillus referred to the excretions of the dirty and sick bodies of those he cared for as “the dough of charity,” and considered this “putting your hands into the dough of charity” a “holy service,” blessed and happy is he who dedicates his life to this task.
Those who are inclined to separate with an insurmountable barrier good from evil make a serious mistake of misunderstanding and inhumanity. The plants that nourish us grow in that foul-smelling muck, just as the flowers whose essences and colors we admire, and that purify the air we breathe.
The effort to be made is to accept oneself in this miserable and painful oscillation between good and evil, simply by living.
