He found himself back at the desk, in the quiet stillness of his room. The same blank page from days ago waited for him, a patient, white field of possibility. But the man looking at the page was different. The paralyzing awe that had silenced him before, the feeling of being too small to describe something so vast, had subsided. So too had the cold grip of the anxiety that had ambushed him yesterday morning. What remained was a quiet curiosity, a focused calm. The page was not a challenge to be conquered, nor a void to be feared. It was simply a space. And he had a new, fragile understanding of how to enter it.
He picked up the pen. His first instinct was to recount the moments of clarity, to narrate the experience in the café, to explain the symphony. He wrote: I went to a café and saw an old man make a coffee. He stared at the sentence. The words were true, but they were lifeless. They were a container with none of the content, a map with none of the territory. The sentence described an event, a sequence of actions in linear time, but the experience itself had not been linear. It had been a web, a resonance, a simultaneous unfolding of past, present, and sensory detail. Conventional language, he realized, was the language of the post office queue. It was designed for transactions, for conveying facts from point A to point B. It was not designed to hold the light.
Frustration flickered, a faint echo of the old static. He could feel the shadow’s temptation to whisper that this was impossible, that he was failing. But the lesson from the post office returned to him: the choice to adjust his focus. The memory of the clerk’s tiny photograph, the smiling dog. He had found a way into her humanity not by understanding her whole life, but by focusing on one small, tangible detail.
He put the pen down again. Perhaps the task was not to describe the entire ocean. Perhaps it was simply to describe a single drop of it with perfect attention. He let his gaze drift across the desk, past the books and the inert pen, and it settled on the most ordinary of objects. A glass of water. He had poured it an hour ago and forgotten about it. It sat there, unassuming, half-full. He decided this would be his practice. Not to write about the universe, but to see the universe in this glass of water.
He leaned forward, looking. Really looking. At first, it was just that: a glass, water, light. But as he softened his focus, the object began to unfold. He noticed the way the light passed through the water, bending at the surface, creating a shimmering, distorted image of the wood grain of the desk beneath it. The glass was a lens, altering the world it contained. On its curved surface, the reflection of his window was warped into a long, dreamlike oval of light. Tiny bubbles clung to the inside of the glass, miniature pearls of air, each one a perfect sphere holding its own tiny, upside-down reflection of the room.
His mind began to follow the story of the water. This water, cool against the glass, where had it been? He imagined it as vapor, invisible in the vast blue of the sky, a part of a cloud drifting over an ocean. He felt the sudden coolness as it condensed into rain, falling over a distant, green mountain range he had never seen. It trickled through soil and rock, joining a stream, then a river, a silent, patient journey of miles and years. It was pulled into the city’s hidden circulatory system, a dark, roaring network of pipes and pumps, a mechanical river flowing beneath the symphony of the street. Then, finally, a turn of his own hand at a faucet, a splash and a gush, and its long journey ended here, in this quiet glass, on his desk.
Then he considered the glass itself. A vessel born of fire and sand. He thought of sand on a beach, countless grains of worn-down rock and shell, each a relic of geological time. He imagined the intense, roaring heat of the furnace that had melted it back into a liquid, erasing its history as sand to give it a new future as glass. Was it shaped by the careful breath of a human artisan, or the precise, unfeeling grip of a machine? Either way, it was a testament to transformation, a solid thing that carried the memory of being liquid, of being fire, of being stone.
He picked up the pen. This time, he did not try to write about the glass of water. He tried to write from it. He let the sensations and the imagined histories flow onto the page, without trying to force them into a neat, linear narrative. The words that came were different.
River-memory in a cage of glass.
A silent journey through dark veins of iron.
Sunlight, bent and dreaming at the bottom.
Fire-ghost, holding water.
The sentences were fragments. They were impressions. They didn't explain anything. But as he read them back, he felt a flicker of the truth of the experience. He had not captured the thing itself, but he had captured a resonance, an echo of it. This was the new language. It was not a language of description, but of translation. A translation of a perception, a feeling, into a texture of words.
He looked at the few lines on the page. They were not a story. They were not a poem, not in any traditional sense. They were a fossil of a moment of attention. And it was enough. The vastness of the world no longer felt like a burden on his ability to express it. It had become an infinite source of these small, translatable moments. He had not written a chapter, but he had found a single, true word. And he knew, with a quiet certainty that settled deep in his bones, that his work was simply to find the next one.
Per l’ elaborazione di parti del contenuto è stato utilizzato l’ ausilio dell’AI Gemini.
Luca.
