Flights

MANO DI GIOVANNI BATTISTA

There’s too much in the world. It would be wiser to reduce it, rather than expanding or enlarging it. We’d be better off stuffing it back into its little can – a portable panopticon we’d be allowed to peek inside only on Saturday afternoons, once our daily tasks had been completed, once we’d made sure there was clean underwear to wear, ironed shirts taut over armrests, floors scrubbed, coffee cake cooling on the window sill. We could peer inside it through a tiny little hole like at the Fotoplastikon in Warsaw, marvelling over its every detail.

But I fear it may already be too late.

We have no choice now but to learn how to endlessly select. Learn how to be like a fellow traveller I once met on a night train who told me that every so often he goes back to the Louvre just to see the one painting he considers to be worthwhile, of John the Baptist. He just stands there before it, beholding it, gazing up at the saint’s raised finger.