This is an impeccably polished marble floor that has somehow become an anthropological diagnosis. And it is scary for me.
If Dante descended through the circles of hell to discover the truth about man, today we slide en masse along a marble surface, without descending anywhere and without penetrating anything. If Dostoevsky's heroes were torn apart by abysses, doubts and guilt, modern man prefers to remain smooth as glass without scratches and without cracks, because light enters through the cracks, and with it pain, the truth about himself. The cruelty of reflecting everything and not being able to hold anything back is scary.
Lately, I have come across more and more people who remind me of an impeccably polished marble floor in an abandoned palace. No traces of footsteps can remain on it, just as no traces of someone else's pain, someone else's thought or someone else's fate remain in their souls. Everyone looks at the floor like a Narcissus in the mirror, in love not with the world but with their own reflection. An awful lot of people have lost their appetite for others and compete to talk only about themselves, and only to the depth of a tablespoon.
The tragedy of our time is becoming inevitable, but not that people have become somehow bad. No. They have become too smooth, like stones that the river of mass culture has rubbed for so long that it has erased any of their unique shape. All that remains is the clean, shiny and shallow surface – an impeccably polished marble floor.
What we see is not the beauty of transparency, but the lack of depth. There is no secret to ripen. There is no thought to mature, no character to forge. Everything is revealed immediately, in its raw form, as if immaturity were a virtue.
How did we get here? Here, where the smooth surface is not just aesthetics but an anthropological diagnosis? Here, where there is no second layer beneath the reflection, no silence beneath the words, and no ongoing inner work, character, or thought beneath the personality. Only the constant surfacing of the immediate.
Like foam on water that was never deep enough.
