Another Choice

Our centre is no more in the personal will, but in a quality of need, which we recognize without yet having ever lived it, a kind of gratuitous aspiration, at times almost painful, which takes flight to nowhere, yet seems full and sure.

Perhaps there is now in us a discontent, which invades us like a still tide.

We find ourselves as if deprived of the motivations that seem to move everyone else and yet not having any new or better reasons to act or to undertake any thing.

The possibilities this human condition offers appear to us now as quite derisory.

Or else, it is like a memory that haunts us, almost a scent or a dimly remembered tune, recalling a fuller and freer life, a denser existence.

Or else we feel – is it an emotion, is it a feeling? – towards a glimpsed face, the colors of a sky over the city, the fragrance of a rosebush, the arrowed flight of seagulls, the gaze of a dog, the familiar gait of a geisha, something like a very intense but very clear surge which our present nature is yet incapable of expressing without betraying it.

Something which, in these instants of breaking through, changes for us the meaning of the word “love”.

***

While the chaff is scattered and blown away, the grain begins to germinate.

***

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