This is where you come in. Yes, because you destroyed with a ball, like Franco Causio1, that chalk base which was in our backyard, in a kind of remembrance of yesteryear. Do you remember? We had given you that nickname while playing beach soccer in front of the sea at sunset, when the heat gave us a break. Only that we wanted to keep doing our goal kicks even when the game on beach was finished. The base was just one of the goal posts in our two playersâ game. What we ever care about what could have represented that copy exported from Acropolis at night time by an ancestor who, moreover, I havenât even had the pleasure of meeting? However, he was one of my distant relatives, part of the family. You know how much is sacred the family for us.
I remember it as if it were yesterday. I assist reluctantly my ancestorâs tomb opening, because they had converged the remains into a common grave. They make me sign a document to consent the opening and the remainsâ transfer, then they ask me if I can prove the full right to be a direct descendant of that archaeologist, so they ask me if I want bring with me some kind of memento. I wasnât in my right mind. I canât understand where they were going with this. I was just leaving when a small bag appeared next to the skeleton, similar to those used for maps and rifle bullets. They asked me if he was a hunter. I said that he was rather a strange archaeologist, for all I knew. They give me reluctantly the bag, from which I realized that they are bound to do so, but whatever. They are funeral company workers, authorized by Local Administration to legalize ancient disused graves. They could never have imagined what they were to deliver.
Surprise, surprise! Do you want to know what was inside? Two paper things, very darkened and wasted by sand. One was an artistic drawing represented a column base. A copy in chalk to be kept in the museum, almost a perpetual memory of Greece greatness. I recognized immediately the base, which in that case wouldnât be in a museum, but in my home yard, until you destroyed it with the ball. All this stuff was for them only ancient papers left besides a skeleton for trivial and indeterminable reasons. It was for me a memory lane of a life lived many years ago, when two kids played soccer as if they were two players in the stadium. Moreover, you didnât scoring, that shot had badly ended up in goalpost, pushed there by your destructive power.
As I learned in philosophy, any destructive power can be solved in a creative power, if well directed and managed in its explosive power. The other sheet, extracted from the bag, was even more interesting, so that I was crossed by a shiver just seeing the signature at the bottom of the time wasted sheet, older than the first one. I kept that moment of epiphany hidden for me, because I could feel funeral workersâ eyes on me, so I tried to divert my interest from that sheet and acted as if nothing had happened. I shook my head as for communicate my indifference for those old papers and they didnât notice anything in my behaviour. I thus resolved to verify the accuracy of that signature and the authenticity of that written text when I was in my home, maybe with someone who knew classical Greek more than me.
It took me 10 years to realize if it was true or not what I had glimpsed that afternoon. I did evaluate that old paper by not one, but at least twenty professors from the best European and American universities, until their judgement was unanimous. Their translation is the one I sent to you. The signature at the bottom of that single page is in fact the only original text with that signature. I couldnât believe in this fortune. I had become the owner of an original writing of the greatest philosopher of the ancient world! It was he who, according to the knowledge so far, had left nothing written! That little sheet darkened by time could maybe change the history of philosophy, but certainly not the flourishing of ideas in the coming time.
So I imagined to do a personal journey in the history of philosophy, beginning with my land and philosophers who here started to ride with their minds the space and time around them, without ever losing sight of the minds of those surrounding them and after them. However, you told me of other philosophers, who in some way had continued the work of Greek philosophers. I have thus been looking for the characters you told. I remembered the divine poet who lived in your born region, to whom some Greek philosophyâs text had come through Arab masters. Then, in the mist of my memories, laid a philosopher unfairly punished by the Church for his free thought. On the same way, another philosopher died in 1900 when the most modern philosophy intertwined with psychoanalysis. I spent the last 10 years of my life searching for the characters you told me about, like a kind of personal initiation in the complex world of philosophy, changing house in the meantime, sometimes forgetting what I was discovering and rediscovering from time to time.
Then, I magically found some comments, amongst thousand notes strewn on the house floor during a removal, which seemed appropriate to explain why these surreal dialogues were born. I donât know when I wrote them, but they were there, ready to be used, written, who knows how long, with a typewriter, to deliver an apparent meaningless jumble of ideas.
It may be important getting something useful to achieve own objectives (and sometimes it is), as well as learning a method to be used in that activity, but this canât be the only hope. It needs to be accompanied by the intention of transmit knowledge to a multitude of people or possibly even to one, in order to have a result from our efforts.
It isnât enough that the best works came from authors inner depths, itâs necessary that from the beginning they are surrounded by an universal breath, in terms of accepting whole populationâs ambitions or at least the people who try to live retracing own roots or looking for a developmental point of view for tomorrowâs humanity, rather than to be simply satisfied to survive for the money.
I think that, rediscovering manâs universal and biological history, we can face a new future, defining new foundations for a less opportunistic and more universally decent life. Ultimately, I donât think that we are made for âlicking devilâs excrementsâ (money was so defined in medieval times). Power and money, like everything else, should be used for acting in the name of all living beings.
It wasnât the first time I went into a whirl of considerations about a society that increasingly disregarded my expectations, but it was maybe the first time that I saw a glint of light at the end of the path. That magic allows you to not give up, my friend, it gives you the strength to keep looking ahead, to search, to try, to create a new begin.
Fear is the first thought that covers mind in a so nagging manner as to envelop it as it was inside a gloomy wood. About what? Of not to be able to express our potential once we understand we werenât invincible. If we all, sooner or later, understand that we are vulnerable, everyone reacts to this fear in a different way: some people prefer to escape from their destiny, others think to be able to control the world and others set out on self-discovery journey. Yes, I know, but itâs useless to say it, we are constantly afraid of death.
Worldly repute is but a breath of wind.
When we think on our body, we are afraid of losing it and, at the same time, we canât advance it, to make it evolve. Death really permeates us conceptually, just because we attach an exaggerated relevance to our physical body, without thinking about our invisible part, even less about the invisible part of an entire population. If thought is the beating heart of a person, culture is the beating heart of a population. Thus, if you used thinking only for the purpose to support your ego instead of contribute to universal culture enrichment, we have lost another opportunity to pulse humanity.
On the contrary, if we expand our point of view to the Earth we live in, death becomes one of the smallest phenomena that have ever existed on this planet, I should say that the planet survives precisely because of beingsâ death and rebirth whose live in its surface.
Fear and death are the two thoughts that have always influenced human work. How do we make sure they donât influence us again?
Homo liber de nulla re minus, quam de morte cogitat, et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vitae meditatio est.2
In our society impoverished of