By Simone Bandini
We are talking about the value of signs and transcendental beauty. Of the magical and sublime power that our time seems to have lost, or rather disqualified in the meanders of materialism and easy, immediate satisfaction, staged with a few euros.
I’ll tell you what happened to me a few days ago.
I had met, by chance and for work, a woman of German origin who, for decades now, has been living on the slopes of Tuscan Apennines. I have always been fascinated by radical choices, so to speak – because I consider the ability to determine one’s daily life, above contingencies, to be a value of freedom. So much so that one might wonder: is it a more extreme choice for a free spirit to indulge one’s nature by implementing important changes, or to remain in the unbearable stasis of an existentially inadmissible situation?
Here that person, for me, in a perhaps idealized imagination, evoked precisely this feeling of freedom, of self-determination. I immediately had the feeling that she belonged to the world of possible and not merely necessary things. I would have liked to collaborate with her but, for some reason, we did not find a way to start our professional partnership.
Then we lost touch for a few years. Maybe three, maybe four years.
Recently, I don’t know why I thought about her again, indulging that vague feeling of ontological and cultural affinity that I had felt, talking with her over coffee.
I called her because I was looking for journalistic support in the area. With little hope, thinking she was too busy to devote time to me.
Instead, I discovered that that intuition was right. We met again and we began to collaborate, with a basic esteem that I believe has a different root – an elective affinity (I hope reciprocated!) of a transcendental nature.
So, the other day, strangely, I came across a photo that she herself had posted online.
A photo at sunset: a panoramic road, an oak tree, an agave in the foreground. Apparently, nothing too special. However, I was struck by the harmonious game, the concurrence of elements conditioned by the last light of day – to indicate a new, metaphysical way beyond. A daring way towards the night, the unknown, the passage from natural to immaterial reality. An inevitable fate for the human condition.
The following Sunday, as I usually do early in the morning, I went running on the Florentine hills, along still deserted streets dotted with steep stone walls and olive trees designed by Franciscan pruning.
I only met a car that stopped shortly after, waiting for me to reach it.
It was her. She was going to Florence.
“Hi Simone!”.
Then I realized that you have to trust signs – if you have the sensitivity and depth to do it.