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We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn”.

Henry David Thoreau

 

The air is unbreathable, and the canary’s song is becoming increasingly feeble. Its chirping begins to fail along with the oxygen. There is nothing permanent here, stability is merely the illusion of a finite mind which finds itself faced with the infinite.

Human beings live a life that’s so short they delude themselves into believing that reality can be regulated and stabilized. They need to trace and determine edges, but they can only do so by continually redefining them. The aspiration to establish an order that is definitive for longer than a moment shows us how easy it is to deceive men, and how it is they who deceive themselves.

Every identity cannot help but construct and demolish itself continuously, adding and removing parts. Once the child has learned to recognize his reflection, he does not stop looking for it in others. Will he ever be able to distinguish what influences him from what he himself has influenced?

He wriggles about and changes shape until his death so as not to look into the depths of the abyss. Sudden and repeated changes in direction make any palimpsest illegible. Deletions, corrections and overlays distance him further and further from who he would have been if that which is not had appeared to him as that which is.

Eternally poised on the edge between coherence and its opposite, like the knight on the chessboard it can only move from black to white and vice versa, unable to move in a straight line.

In the crowd, in an uninterrupted game of glances and reflections, in the slippage between reality and the imagination, our echo reverberates. In the multitude, identities are reshaped and masks are defined. But what would happen if no one could ever again see their own reflection?

Francesco Scalas

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn”.

Henry David Thoreau

 

The air is unbreathable, and the canary’s song is becoming increasingly feeble. Its chirping begins to fail along with the oxygen. There is nothing permanent here, stability is merely the illusion of a finite mind which finds itself faced with the infinite.

Human beings live a life that’s so short they delude themselves into believing that reality can be regulated and stabilized. They need to trace and determine edges, but they can only do so by continually redefining them. The aspiration to establish an order that is definitive for longer than a moment shows us how easy it is to deceive men, and how it is they who deceive themselves.

Every identity cannot help but construct and demolish itself continuously, adding and removing parts. Once the child has learned to recognize his reflection, he does not stop looking for it in others. Will he ever be able to distinguish what influences him from what he himself has influenced?

He wriggles about and changes shape until his death so as not to look into the depths of the abyss. Sudden and repeated changes in direction make any palimpsest illegible. Deletions, corrections and overlays distance him further and further from who he would have been if that which is not had appeared to him as that which is.

Eternally poised on the edge between coherence and its opposite, like the knight on the chessboard it can only move from black to white and vice versa, unable to move in a straight line.

In the crowd, in an uninterrupted game of glances and reflections, in the slippage between reality and the imagination, our echo reverberates. In the multitude, identities are reshaped and masks are defined. But what would happen if no one could ever again see their own reflection?

Francesco Scalas

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