WHEN THE WORLD RECOGNIZES US FIRST

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There are moments when believing in who you once were no longer feels like believing in yourself. I notice it in the way I receive new ideas, not because the ones that came before were never worthy of recognition, but because something inside me has quietly changed.
Then I begin to feel something that seems familiar. I cannot honestly call it recognition. Not yet.
How many voices have I been listening to without even realizing it? One speaks of suffering. Another finds its way into love. At times I feel I am standing very close to madness, though perhaps it is simply the kind of madness we call poetry: imagining trees that guard a memory older than language itself. I still ask myself whether it is nothing more than folly.
Another part of me simply watches itself as a human heart, fragile in all its wholeness, or at least believing it still is, choosing to remain open.
It is true that those voices seem to move in different directions, while in my mind they had always remained separate. I still remember the strange feeling that every page was somehow waiting for the next one.
I often return to those days, lived beneath the weight of a season that offered no rest. Yet my love for writing never allowed me to stop. Looking back now, I realize that I was never describing different realities. They were different viewpoints looking toward the same reality.
I. Before We Learn to Recognize
I have been writing for a long time, yet I still fail to grasp that view the world is showing me. We are always trying to find the right answers, while overlooking the ones our eyes are not yet able to see.
The intuition is that perhaps everything begins much earlier.
We are stubborn enough not to remain beside a question, and naïve enough to rush toward solving it. I smile at myself whenever I realize there are truths that are not waiting to be explained. I find them again within myself, surprising me, as they wait to be recognized.
II. The Things That Refuse to Be Forgotten
As a child, I would stand beneath the trees while I played and, in the meantime, I would watch their roots. I would find myself suspended in a memory that had only just brushed against me.
The existence of a tree that gives life without anyone returning gratitude as a gift. Whether such a tree truly exists matters very little.
I imagined the roots as something our lives often hide: in the dampness of the earth, where everything ferments, our most intimate thoughts often come to rest.
I see again in those roots the steadfastness every human being should possess: a gesture of kindness toward those who sustain the roots of life; a wound hidden in the earth so that it may be healed by the humus that renews it; a promise that keeps the ability to remain faithful, like a root.
A silence was shared between two presences: between the tree and me, for that is what I believed it to be.
The passing of time changes the shape of each one of us, but it does not erase our presence. Perhaps memory belongs to the world long before it belongs to us. The tree told me so through its silence, which I listened to in the shade of its coolness.
III. When Suffering Removes Our Disguises
How many masks I have worn in my life. It was not my choice: I adapted to the system, to structures that did not belong to me. Yet I was forced, although my own will resisted, while a voice spoke of suffering.
I do not see it as punishment. Perhaps it was because I had betrayed myself. Not as a virtue, but rather as a play on words that I wore in those moments. At times I felt ashamed of myself.
Sometimes fortune comes to meet us simply as a place in life where the masks we have learned to wear slowly lose their strength.
It is natural that it should be this way: the seasons are not all the same, and the pain of passing through them makes us feel smaller. Then there are others in which, almost without a sound, it takes away everything that no longer allows us to remain authentic. The pain becomes sharper, until it becomes unbearable.
The difference is rarely found in suffering itself. It is found in the way we continue—or stop—resisting what it is showing us.
Sometimes the deepest recognitions arrive only after our strongest certainties have learned to fall silent.
IV. Belonging Before Understanding
My verticality leads me to ask questions that go beyond their intuition. Thoughts begin to surface that I had never listened to. What a tragedy, what a loneliness not to have understood them.
We want to become the identity of something or someone else. What an incredible mistake. We become subject to tools that violate us without really knowing what we are.
Caught in ready-made stereotypes we are expected to resemble: it is pure madness.
Then they ask us where desire is born. That is a good one: how can you know if you have never truly been yourself?
I cannot help laughing at myself: I fell for it like a fool.
My own verticality pulled me back by the ears, making me see a reality that seems like an illusion.
Behind every ambition there is an apparent reality that hides our desires. Perhaps the urgency of conquest takes away the most sacred part of us, the part called welcome.
Love seems to recognize it, just as genuine and authentic friendship reveals who you truly are, without supports that cannot hold you. Then they become strangely familiar long before we understand why.
Recognition often comes before explanation.
V. The Conversation Beneath Every Voice
Literature has always seemed to celebrate differences, and that is true.
From the country I come from, I breathe Mediterranean air: a mixture of cultures that have shaped history for thousands of years, revealing social, cultural, and religious differences. Different languages, different beliefs, different attitudes, different cultures.
They have never prevented humanity from growing. Through its mistakes, it has reshaped itself over the centuries.
Different lives have followed one another: Greek, Roman, Muslim, Swabian, and many others.
Yet sometimes those differences become transparent, because they accompany human beings along their own paths. Not because they disappear: they have changed over time and, deep within, something begins to move through them.
One author speaks through myth, fascinated by a time he believed to be true. One turns to psychology, searching for explanations for what is missing in the world. Another finds expression through poetry, setting the self free, not to convince, but to reveal itself in the light of life. Still another speaks through silence, where every silent word accompanies the long journey of thought.
No one repeats another.
Yet they all seem to guard the same quiet flame.
VI. The Place That Was Waiting
In my readings I listened to the sounds of words and, at that moment, I understood why they had continued to accompany me.
They did not try to explain themselves through questions or opinions: they represented points of view I had not considered. Perhaps in the past I had passed over some of them, but none of them tried to convince me of anything. None of them offered certainty—and who has that in this life?
Instead, each one gently led me toward a place I could never have reached on my own. They are the places where the mind opens, without precise answers: only points of observation that reveal what had escaped you.
They are not places on a map, created to prove something concrete. They are places where deep attentiveness lives.
Perhaps that is where every authentic work of art leads us: not to the end of a line of thought, but to the beginning of a recognition. It deserves a writing like this.
Epilogue
When I finished reading, I realized that none of those reflections truly belonged to the individual authors who had written them.
They had become something within me that I had not considered.
This is where the surprise begins: they belonged to the conversation that, almost without being noticed, had come into being between them.
The incredible strength of writing: perhaps this is why some books continue to accompany us long after we have forgotten their pages.
They do not ask us to become someone else, nor do they ask to be fed. Their task is to remind us of something that has never completely disappeared.
We often believe—and fall into the illusion—that we are the ones searching for meaning. But meaning has neither destination nor end: it reaches one place only to pass through another.
A task that has a dimension, but no end.
Perhaps, instead, it is meaning that, with patience, has always been searching for us. And sometimes, before we are even able to recognize the world... it is the world that has already recognized us first.
Author's Note
When I finished reading the book, I realized those words no longer belonged to their authors. It was as if their DNA had changed and become something shared by everyone.
For a moment, I wondered how that could have happened. The words were exactly the same, yet they worked in a different way. To my surprise, I realized they had begun calling to one another.
Perhaps that is the quiet magic of certain books. They hold words that remain silent for years, with no clear memory attached to them. Then, one day, you open the book again, and it gives back something you thought you had left behind.
We search for meaning everywhere, in almost everything. Today, though, I find myself wondering whether meaning is not waiting for us all along, patiently expecting the moment when we are finally able to recognize it.
— Antonio Castellaneta