Towards the renewal
3DP War Journal #92
Easter does not begin with joy. It begins with darkness, with a tomb, with the silence that fills the space after something has ended. Only later - and not immediately - does renewal come.
That sequence matters.
The world right now is in that first phase. There is no point pretending otherwise.
Wars with no prospect of a quick or easy resolution. Millions of people on the move, with no clear destination. Inflation eroding the savings of those who have played by the rules their entire lives.
And above it all - the artificial intelligence sector, which promised the future, raised trillions of dollars for it, and is now beginning to falter. OpenAI and others have built sandcastles, financed by enthusiasm and the fear of missing out on something big.
When that structure begins to crumble - and there are serious indications that it might - all of us will feel it.
This is not a cinematic apocalypse scenario. This is the normal course of things.
And this is precisely where the logic of Easter begins.
Take something as trivial and obvious as an Easter egg. A hard shell, an unseen interior, and within it something that is only just becoming itself. We don’t know when it will crack. We cannot speed up the process. We can only know that if there is life inside - it will crack.
History knows no case of a night that lasted forever. It knows many cases, however, in which people - exhausted, frightened, stripped of illusions - endured until dawn and discovered that life could go on. Often differently than they had planned. But it could go on.
This is not a promise that it will be easy. Nor is it comfort for those who have already lost something irretrievable. It is simply an observation: crises have a structure. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The one we are in is no exception.
After the storm, the sun shines - it sounds banal until you are standing in the middle of the storm. Then it is the only sentence that makes sense.
Things will be different from before. Some of what we have grown used to will not return. But what is meant to endure - will endure. And what has been destroyed to make room for something new - will make that room.
The second day of Easter is the quietest one. The gravity of Friday is gone, the drama of Sunday has passed. There is only the day after. A bit of fatigue, a bit of relief, and a lingering question - what now?
That is the right question. And the right moment to ask it.
Happy Easter.
The featured image is “Resurrection” by Otto Dix from 1949. Dix, a veteran of the trenches of the First World War, painted without anesthesia throughout his life: mutilated soldiers, corpses on battlefields, the Germany of the Weimar Republic in all its brutality.
His resurrected Christ is not a triumphant icon, but a figure emerging from chaos and wounds, marked by what it has endured. It is a resurrection for someone who knows what hell means - and precisely for that reason, it is credible.
In the background I used fragments of another painting: “Trench Warfare”.