Landscape and Memory
The poetics of meaningful living.
Architecture is a way of seeing the world and of transforming it.
It is a cultural fact that proposes and, in certain instances, provokes civilization. It is an
intelligent synthesis of experiences and spaces, and of a handful of nostalgia.
It is also the gaze that traverses with rigor and enthusiasm the little things of life, that
sublimates the everyday, that resolves for example, the function of a window because
through it the landscape comes indoors, or the design of a courtyard which allows man to
discover the stars and to limit the infinite.
And architecture owes as much to the everyday as to the most spiritual elements in art. I t
helps resolve man's small problems, but, at the same time, it is in charge, of the great
themes of civilization and of the great works of universal culture. It transforms nature and
molds the city. It is the pulse of a place and a meeting place for reason and poetry, for
clarity and magic.
But this wisdom is not only knowledge. It is a spiritual heritage that emerges* when a
given stimulus excites memory, awakening the souvenir.
Architectural knowledge, therefore, is nothing less than the fruit of a continuous
theoretical and project search; a work through which one attempts to capture -although
this cannot ever be fully accomplished. Man's dream to create his own place or, as Gaston
Bachelard would say: his own niche in the world.
To make architecture is to remember to re-create. It is to continue in time what others have
in turn re-created. It is a revival of elements that already exist. The courtyards, atarjeas or
troughs, the thresholds, and the transparencies can not be reinvented. Architecture is in
tacit agreement with history, since every work informs the next one; it is the result of a
continuous practice in search for the essence.
It constitutes a deep cultural act, since it is not possible to recreate the unknown. On the
contrary, it is wisdom that permits choice and selection, and this is the great moment of
creation. The moment in which, as happens in music, one begins to compose, to transform
what exists, to elaborate the form, to define the particular spatiality of each work. It is the
moment that establishes architecture's spirituality.
Given its complexity, architecture is not only an aesthetic fact. Architecture has to be lived
in; it has to be dwelled in. As we move through built spaces, through architectural spaces,
we receive visual, olfactory, auditive and haptic (tactile*) stimuli. They are corners that
preserve the emotions and souvenirs of the world. We live in these souvenirs as the stars
do in the firmament, always attracted among themselves.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez said in one of his interviews that to make literature one has to
look back, look at one's own literature. One must study it and know to be able to track at
what historical moment we are at the moment of writing.
I agree. The same applies to architecture. It is convenient to look back before stepping
forward. Would not it be a waste to disregard the great works of universal architecture?
And being American architects, to disregard the great open pre-Hispanic complexes, the
subtlety of colonial architecture, the richness of the crossbreeding or "metizage" the
simplicity of popular architecture and the innovations and social content of Modern
Architecture?
Yes, indeed. It is convenient to look back, but one must know that at the right moment the
gaze has to be withdrawn. It is a matter of recreation and transformation. Not of copying.
To withdraw the gaze, but also to keep it deeply when one traverses the centenary plazas,
the forgotten courtyards, the galleries and entrance thresholds that have witnessed
history's parade, to find in the silence it own resonance. To keep the gaze in order to
measure and draw all those places that move us so we can keep them in the memory so
we can one day remember their measures, echoes, resonance to compose, recharging the
architectural work with emotion, the surprising spaces, the meeting places.
Memory helps to find the way of poetry. It helps to discover that it is possible and
necessary compose with the material, with light and shadows, with humidity, with
transparency and skewed views to achieve an enriched spatiality for the senses.
Different to the other arts, architecture, substantially abstract although utilitarian in
material terms, is conditioned by the events and the context of which it is part. One of its
characteristics is that it has to have a clear concept of reality, that is it must be able to
evaluate what it is its own; must know how to extract from the bottom of its own
geography and culture the solutions that fit best the needs and behaviors. Architecture
should never drift away from its time or its people.
But it must go beyond.
It must propose spaces that induce emotion, which can be apprehended with the sight but
also with the senses of smell and the touch, with the silence and the sound, the luminosity
and the penumbra and the transparency that can be traversed allowing the discovery of
unexpected spaces.
As for me, I prefer the architecture that allows me to hear the resonance of the emotions,
And I am moved by those architectures that allow a glimpse of the trembling hand that
builds them and constructs them, with its doubts, its mistakes and attempts as silent notes
in the final result.
Above all its doubts. Doubt always generates discovery, it allows distancing from
ideological schemes, it forces thought and the seeing of things with the eyes without
prejudice.
Doubts but also certainties. One of them is the nearing, ever closer, to the place where
architecture is composed and is constructed.
To know how to interpret this is a way to enrich it.
Architecture, then as functional problem, efficient, as a cultural act, collective and
historical, but also architecture for the landscape, and architecture for the senses.
The best architecture is, I believe, that which transforms without modifying, which unveils
slowly with emotion and that is capable of proposing spaces that enchant, make one
happy and surprise. That is profound poetics.
Non è sempre possibile fare il solista, ma spesso è anche importante sapere cantare nel coro,
confondere ed annullare la propria individualità per rispondere alle esigenze del brano o alla
direzione del conduttore d’orchestra.
Phenomena and Idea
Experience of phenomena -- sensations in space and time as distinguished from the perception of
objects -- provides a "pre-theoretical" ground for architecture.
Such perception is pre-logical ie., it requires a suspension of apriori thought. Phenomenology,
questions of perception, encourages us to experience architecture by walking through it, touching
it, listening to it. " Seeing things" requires slipping into a world below the everyday neurosis of the
functioning world. An underground city for which we have keys without locks, it is full of mysteries.
Phenomenology as a way of thinking and seeing becomes an agent for architectural conception.
While phenomenology restores us to the importance of lived experience in authentic philosophy, it
relies on perception of pre-existing conditions. It has no way of forming a-priori beginnings. Making
a non-empirical architecture requires a conception or a formative idea. In each project we begin
with information and disorder, confusion of purpose, program ambiguity, an infinity of materials and
forms. All of these elements, like obfuscating smoke, swirl in a nervous atmosphere. Architecture is
a result of acting on this indeterminacy.
To open architecture to questions of perception, we must suspend disbelief, disengage the rational
half of the mind, and simply play and explore. Reason and skepticism must yield to a horizon of
discovery. Doctrines cannot be trusted in this laboratory. Intuition is our muse. The creative spirit
must be followed with happy abandon. A time of research precedes synthesis.
In music one says that something is "meant" by a particular movement. Do architectural thoughts
have equivalent "meanings?" Is there a way of thinking in the material of construction? A way of
thinking in materials which may yield a coupling of thinking-making specific to architecture? Making
architecture involves a thought that forms itself through the material in which it is made. The
thinking-making couple of architecture occurs in silence. Afterward, these "thoughts" are
communicated in the silence of phenomenal experiences. We hear the "music" of architecture as
we move through spaces while arcs of sunlight beam white light and shadow.
In a "zero ground" without site, program, or time, certain types of perception emerge as
"phenomenal zones." Experimental territories, these zones of intensely charged silence lie beyond
words. In opposition to those who insist on speech, on language, on signs and referents, we strive
to escape language-time bondage. To evolve theoretically in active silence encourages
experimentation. Silent phenomenal probes haunt the polluted sea of language like submarines
gliding along the sandy bottom, below the oil-slick of rhetoric.
Certain physical interactions offer zones of investigation: Color projection is experienced when
light, reflected off a brightly colored surface, then bounced onto a neutral white surface, becomes a
glowing phenomena that provokes a spatial sense. Reflected color is seen indirectly; it remains,
with a ghostlike blush, the absent referent to an experience. In experiments with these phenomena
we have discovered an emotional dimension that suggests a "psychological space."
A sponge can absorb several times its weight in liquid without changing its appearance. Cast glass
seems to trap light within its material. Its translucency or transparency maintains a glow of reflected
light, refracted light or the light dispersed on adjacent surfaces. This intermeshing of material
properties and optic phenomena opens a field for exploration. Phenomenal zones likewise open to
sound, smell, taste, and temperature as well as to material transformation.
Overlapping perspectives, due to movement of the position of the body through space create
multiple vanishing points, opening a condition of spatial parallax. Perspectival space considered
through the parallax of spatial movement differs radically from the static perspectival point of
Renaissance space and the rational positivist space of modern axonometric projection. A dynamic
succession of perspectives generates the fluid space experienced from the point of view of a body
moving along an axis of gliding change. This axis is not confined to the x - y plane but includes the
x-y-z dimensions manifesting themselves in the other dimensions, gravitational forces,
electromagnetic fields, time, etc. Perspectives of phenomenal flux, overlapping perspective space
is the "pure space" of experiential ground.
Architecture is born when actual phenomena and the idea that drives it intersect. Whether a
rationally explicit statement or a subjective demonstration, a concept establishes an order, a field
of inquiry, a limiting principle. The concept acts as a hidden thread connecting disparate parts with
exact intention. Meanings show through at this intersection of concept and experience.
A structuring thought requires continuous adjustment in the design process to set manifold
relations among parts within the larger whole. As dimensions of perception and experience unfold
in the design process, constant adjustments aim at a balance of idea and phenomena.
"Kajitsu"
Japanese Zen poets developed a vocabulary to discuss Kajitsu or a poem's aspect and form. Ka is
the beautiful surface of a poem while jitsu is its substantial core. An organic fusion of spirit and
intellect opens a path toward inspiration, awareness, and yugen, the Buddhist term for "depth of
meaning."
Uncovering the elusive essence of architecture, its depth of meaning or substantial core, requires
passion and enthusiasm. The search for meaning demands a resistance to empty formalism,
textual obfuscation and commercialism. Focusing on ideas early in the design process sets the
substantial core ahead of the surface.
If there is life in ideas, a passion for architecture is renewed in the clarification of these ideas. For
what is an architectural concept if not the material and spatial expression of spiritual intentions?
Intertwining of intellect and feeling is inherent in thought intuitively developed, thought that seeks
clarity rather than possesses truth, thought that searches and is open to the changing field of
culture and nature that it expresses. Although intuition cannot be explicitly expressed, we cannot
condemn intuitive work to ambiguity.
Architecture, perhaps more than any other form of communication, possesses the power of uniting
intellectual and intuitive expression. Fusing the objective with the subjective, architecture can stitch
our daily lives together by a single thread of intensity. It can possess both the core depth and the
radiant surface by which to concretize the spirit. We must look beyond the ka of a beautiful surface
to contemplate the jitsu of the core substance.
Soul
Soul is essential to architecture. A building stands in mute solitude yet receptive individuals silently
perceive the soul instilled in the work. Soul lies in attention to detail distilled in space and
concretized in the love of construction. This love can take the form of shimmering icicle prisms or
perspectives of steel.
In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas developed teachings linking theology and
philosophy which held that all knowledge begins with sense perception. The direct connection of
soul and perception was taught in "clear sighted penetration of the soul into objects of
perception..."
Nourishment of soul begins by allowing greater expression of the language of the imagination, by
suspending disbelief in favor of experiment, and by seeing things. Cultivating of a metaphorical
sense of reality...a mythopoetic understanding of indefinable experiences and mysteries enriches
the soul. Just as the unconscious and the intuitive can be intentionally brought to bear on thoughts
and decisions, the intense exploration of a particular locus, together with material, can endow form
with greater psychological significance. Like an electrical charge, soul passes from the artist into
objects, and through eyes from the object to the viewer.
Reflection on perception in the design process considers all scales, including the micro scale of
material properties. Even the most common seemingly inert material must be allowed to "speak" its
essence. Kandinsky addresses this approach:
Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even
a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street. Everything has a secret soul, which is
silent more than it speaks.
Triumphant expressions of life often emerge despite the cycles of death by which they are
surrounded. The question of soul is a question of will. The spirit of a community or society as well
as that of an individual is often a pathologized territory. New investigations and new projects must
be undertaken. Today the urgency of the soul is provoked by unprecedented human coldness.
An inexplicable modern soul unfolds from tragedy and absurdity. Hope rises on the ground of
desperate conditions indirectly proportional to the emotional intensity of the situation: in the writings
of Franz Kafka, and André Breton, the tragic and seemingly absurd are taken to extremes, yielding
a strange existential hope. Humiliating circumstances and absurd predicaments are a part of
everyday life in the modern metropolis, yet these conditions fuel the modern soul.
To embrace the unique anxieties of our time, one must avoid false optimism and the phantoms of
nostalgia. Our challenge is to make spaces of a serenity and exhilaration that allow the modern
soul to emerge. Our everyday lives include the upside-down view of the earth, in a live television
broadcast in which figures walk without gravity, or stroll along a sidewalk past barrels of live crabs
fighting each other. The modern soul, its unprecedented spirit, must have an architecture.
Meshing Sensation and Thought
If I walk along a shore towards a ship which has run aground, and the funnel or masts merge into
the forest bordering on the sand dune, there will be a moment when these details suddenly
become part of the ship; and indissolubly fused with it. As I approached, I did not perceive
resemblances or proximities which finally came together to form a continuous picture of the upper
part of the ship. I merely felt that the look of the object was on the point of altering, that something
was imminent in this tension, as a storm is imminent in storm clouds. M. Merleau-Ponty
Perception of architecture entails manifold relations of three fields: the foreground, middle ground
and distant view are united in one experience as we observe and reflect while occupying a space.
Mergings of these fields of space bracket very different perceptions. In the intertwining of the larger
space with its forms and proportions and the smaller scale of materials and details lies
architecture's power to exhilarate. Such phenomenal territory cannot be indicated in plan/section
methods. Photography can only present one field clearly, excluding changes in space and time.
The weak link from perception back to inception must be scrutinized and strengthened. The
traditional drawing of a plan is a blind notation, nonspatial and nontemporal. Perspectives of
overlapping fields of space break this short circuit in the design process. Perspective precedes
plan and section to give a priority to bodily experience and bind creater and perceiver. The spatial
poetry of movement through overlapping fields is animated parallax .
To work simultaneously in foreground, middle ground, and distant view, an architect must
constantly think of the next smaller and the next larger scales. The master plan of a campus space,
for example, must consider the space between and within buildings as well as details of materials,
glossy or dull or luminescent. Models
constructed in plaster, wire, acid-transformed brass, and other construction materials balanced
against a range of perspective views set an intermeshing design process in motion.
The phenomenal merge of object and field is accomplished via attention to individual site and
situation. The hackneyed terms contextualism or context have encouraged an operation whereby a
new building, chameleonlike, takes characteristics from each of its neighbors without maintaining
internal integrity.
Rather, actual experience envisioned in light, perspective and material must be cross-referenced in
an analytic process open to a new architecture that may not yet be understood. Architecture
inserted into an existing situation may not strive to replicate or to achieve autonomy via contrast.
Meshing of site and situation with an integrally conceived new architecture yields a third condition;
a new interrelation - a new "place" - is formed.
Time's Multiplicity
As the imperceptible downward flow of glass in the lower portion of window panes measures the
passage of time, architecture also serves as an index of time. Second, minute, hour, month, year,
decade, epoch, millennium all are focused by the lens of architecture. Architecture is among the
least ephemeral, most permanent expressions of culture.
Nostalgia, an irrational yearning for the return to another time, dominates American architecture
today. Preservation of the past continues in the mind, in books, in photographs and films, and in
the conservation of past construction but simulating the past is a travesty of the present. This
return to a romanticized time avoids of the existential burden of time - its angst and its joy.
A certain resistance, a "negative capability," is necessary to exist and act in the present. The past
and the future do not exist. It is important to think and to act on our thinking in the present. We are
not merely of our time, we are our time. In our time the nature of speed itself has transformed the
definition of space. The acceleration of fluctuating trends renders it impossible to meet everchanging appetites. To last, to endure, is a primary challenge to architecture conceived today.
Strategies transcending the novel and image-driven in architecture counter the ongoing historical
time of Western culture with a cyclical time of particular place and individual circumstance. For
each distinct situation there is a time, yielding a "multiplicity of times." For example, for Islamic
theologians time is not a continuous flow but a galaxy of instants. Space is nonexistent except in
points. Alternately, from Bergson's point of view, space is the "impure combination of
homogeneous time." Bergson's idea of "duration" includes a "multiplicity of secession, fusion and
organization" These two ideas of time - as space or as continuous multiplicity and flow correspond roughly to the strange cultural conditions of the world today.
While a global movement electronically connects all places and cultures in a continuous time-place
fusion, the opposite tendency coexists in the uprising of local cultures and expression of place. In
these two forces - one a kind of expansion, the other a kind of contraction - time-space is being
formed. A new architecture must be formed that is simultaneously aligned with transcultural
continuity and with a poetic expression of individual situation and community.
Expanding toward an ultra-modern world of flow while condensing sunlight or the texture of stone,
on a single plot of land, this architecture aspires to Blake's admonition "to see the universe in a
grain of sand." Poetic illumination of unique qualities of places, individual culture, and individual
spirit reciprocally connects to the transcultural, trans-historical present. Architecture is a
transforming link. An art of duration, crossing the abyss between ideas and orders of perception,
between flow and place, it is a binding force. It bridges the yawning gap between the intellect and
senses of sight, sound, and touch, between the highest aspirations of thought and the body's
visceral and emotional desires. A multiplicity of times are fastened, a multitude of phenomena are
fused, and a manifold intention is realized.
Idea
It is precisely the realm of ideas - not of forms or styles - that presents the most promising legacy
of twentieth-century architecture. The twenty-first century propels architecture into a world where
meanings cannot be completely supplied by historical languages. Modern life brings with it the
problem of the meaning of the larger whole. The increased size and programmatic complexity of
buildings amplify the innate tendency of architecture toward abstraction. The tall office building, the
urban apartment house, and the hybrid of commercial complex call for more open ideas more
imaginative organization of a work of architecture. Organization of overall form depends on a
central concept to which other elements remain subordinate.
In the experimental work of tentative investigations we remain explorers. This new freedom
produces an anxiety that must be embraced with enthusiasm. The practice of a refined
methodology, a technical skill, has now seeped through the osmotic membrane of a narrow
profession into the open sea and must be nourished with a passion for discovery. New
architectures can only be born if we leave habitual ways of working and reject unthinking methods.
Easily grasped images are the signature of today's culture of consumer architecture. Subtle
experiences of perception as well as intellectual intensity are overshadowed by familiarity. A
resistance to commercialism and repetition is not only necessary, it is essential to a culture of
architecture.
The experience of space, light, and material as well as the socially condensing forces of
architecture are the fruit of a developed idea. When the intellectual realm, the realm of ideas, is in
balance with the experiential realm, the realm of phenomena, form is animated with meaning. In
this balance, architecture has both intellectual and physical intensity, with the potential to touch
mind, eye, and soul.
FIUMARA
The land in this part of the world offers no cheap and easy access to introspection and divine majesty. Its
beauty is hidden, and when it is not, it has fallen prey to years and years of abusive conduct at the hands of a
class of builders without shame and politicians without scruples. The entire territory of Castel di Tusa is, in
fact, such a land and, in the detail, the fiumara of the Halesus River is also barren and arid with the
exception, perhaps, of two or three winter months. Why then begin this journey from here, in a land of such
hardship? Why place at the end of the dry riverbed the sculpture that would represent the first of a series of
art works? Why here in a land that had been scorched by both local climate and socio-politics?
To paraphrase the words of Belden C. Lane, extreme land can be an outer place of starkness, terror and
privation, but also of beauty; more importantly though, it is also the place of an encounter with God, an inner
place, embodied in the experiences of relinquishment and privation. Moreover, if the traveler endures the
hardship he will find the path to the living waters.
000
As he began to envision the Fiumara d’Arte like a path of discovery of both the territory and the self,
Antonio Presti recognized the visitor to be like a cross between a traveler and a pilgrim who was moved by
opposite motivations to those of any business, different from a mere intellectual curiosity and even from a
familiar encounter with nature. He recognized that the trip which began here had to be something more than
a mere art walk; something that would be much closer, in essence and in structure, to a pilgrimage of the
soul.
In this optic, three major elements can be recognized here: a) the pilgrim-like traveler who walks the path; b)
a place of inevitable conclusion, chosen in function of its position and in relation to its ability to originate a
potential change; and c) the motivation of the traveler in search of and awaiting an encounter with a reality
that is both invisible and mysterious.
These components are the same three elements that would otherwise characterize a religious pilgrimage as
well: the road, the center and the encounter with the Mystery of God. The difference here is that the
structure is not fixed but kept loose and flexible; the potential of beginning left entirely up to the visitor; the
potential of initiation depending only upon the presence inside the visitor of that something to be awakened.
A testament to this attitude which speaks only of potential and suggestion rather than overt invitation and
encouragement, of a passive rather than an active mode, of nonprescription rather than prescription, is the
map of the entire site prepared by Presti.
000
Speaking of the exploring instinct in man, John Anderson refers in a seminal book by the same title to what
he calls the Ulysses Factor and says that it: «…is a complex of impulses in an individual prompting him to
seek firsthand physical experience of something hitherto unknown (to him) that has aroused his curiosity. It
must include the impulse to learn firsthand through physical action: what, is immaterial; it may be to
discover what lies beyond a range of hills, to see new stars by traveling to some new part of the earth’s
surface to observe the heavens, to find the source of a river, to discover if there is a far side to an apparent
limitless ocean. This is the main force - the physical satisfaction of man’s curiosity. » And he adds that the
factor «will always be related to the need to know [italic sic]»
Presti himself says: «The admonition here is that one needs only to execute, to carry out, to be the conduttore
di opera, a universal opera, a work of art. To make is to know; to do is to know; to do the path is to know.
You must walk the path in order to know; this is the meaning of life. Instead we grow into men, we forget
that we are the universe and we begin to work in the realm of the finite.»
The desire to know in absolute terms is mediated at the Fiumara by the desire to know this place. One that
grows slowly in the visitor as if intuiting that this way of knowing might be able to reveal degrees of truth of
a more comprehensive scale. This is the call of the site, the call of this dry river of art; once having resisted
the easy temptation of not embarking on this path and having won the battle of entry against tedium, this
path may, indeed, reward the traveler with the knowledge sought in the beginning, a knowledge of value
which is not only apt to understand the specific site of the Fiumara but especially the vast site of the human
soul.
The intention is that by understanding the humus of this place, by descending into this realm of mere senses,
one is able to understand its memory, to penetrate this memory and, in so doing, uncover the hidden
connections of the self with the universe.
It is in this spirit that, as the journey of the Fiumara d’Arte continues, the works of art along the path perform
the task of connecting, the task of making manifest the inner workings of the soul at ease in such a context
unlike reason and the task of opening the doors of knowledge rather than presenting further obstacles to
overcome.
So it was that, after the first, a series of new sculptures were born. At the time, American poet Gregory
Corso wrote extemporaneously the following verses:
From matter that does not exist
I have half-entered a labyrinth
having gone out and up on a blue wave
I then ended up going down a cavern
tired, I went through a tumble-down hotel
and there I dreamt of a final house.
000
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says that no culture would probably exist if human beings were not afraid of
their own mortality. Culture would be useless if it were not for the devouring need to forget, there would be
no transcendence were there not something to transcend. In the light of mortality all meaning pales
therefore, this light must be extinguished, even if only once and for a short time, for the meaning of life to
reappear solid and reliable. The constant risk of death, that risk which is always known even when we chose
to throw it into the depths of the unconscious, becomes therefore the true foundation of culture and that is
why Belden C. Lane encourages us to find the desert wherever we can.
When we embark on the desert of the Fiumara and finally enter «Arianna,» we conclude a journey that had
begun at the end, and it is here, as we enter, where we find ourselves. The final result is always the origin,
the beginning, as in Plato’s Euthydemus where Socrates, the narrator, tells Crito: «We arrived to the kingly
art. We were trying to see if this art were capable of producing happiness. But at this point we found
ourselves as in a labyrinth, and when we thought we had reached our goal, when the circuit had been
completed, we found ourselves again, as we had been at the beginning of our investigation as far away from
the conclusion, exactly as when we had begun to seek.»
When the task of architecture is to make visible how the world touches us, as Juhani Pallasmaa says citing
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, architecture does begin to speak to us in a more intimate way, in a manner that,
paraphrasing Alberto Pérez-Gómez in his essay «Hermeneutics as Architectural Discourse» communicates
the possibility of recognizing ourselves as complete, in order to dwell poetically on earth and thus be wholly
human. This recognition occurs in experience, its meaning is inseparable from experience, like in a poem. It
cannot be paraphrased and it has the capacity of changing one’s life.
The art works of Fiumara d’Arte are indeed part of the heritage of the land they inhabit but they are also part
of the cultural heritage of mankind. The thought of art as a universal message that eludes any materialistic
and consumerist label, such as «mine» or «yours,» is therefore a message of man to men, one that has to be
lived in its totality and that shies away from matter, realizing itself in a spiritual dimension, in that silence
that only needed to be heard.
Myth can still awaken today, as in Antiquity, that sense of awe, gratitude and rapture,
which are the fuel that drives the soul. The object of man’s seeking is not a meaning for life but rather an
experience of being alive in a manner such as this experience will resonate with that of our soul, with that of
our daimon; the elusive meaning explained simply by the very existence of man, by the simple fact that he is
here, to walk on this path and to endure on his journey.