As I was reading the article that Professor Pellacani sent me some day in November 2016, I ended up wandering through the infinity that surrounds us, starting from my small desk... so many things I don’t know and I will never know, so many things I haven’t seen and I will never see. It’s my curiosity, the human desire to possess something even in the form of knowledge, that takes me out on the road and listen to other people’s concerns, look at their works, read their thoughts and their stories, dream of traveling and exploring, raise my eyes to the sky at night and wonder about the immensity of the space and the possibility that we are not the only inhabitants of this Universe.
For what reason? To affirm that my presence on planet Earth is worth something? To use the time that has been given to me in some way? I live in an infinite space, made of infinite culture, infinite ideas, dreams, creation. An infinity of infinities.
As I read the definition of PANSPERMIA, a word of which I did not even suspect the existence before the article by professor Pellacani (which is published here and has inspired the theme of this issues), and thought of the contamination, of the super-heroic resistance that makes a bacterium arrive somewhere, reproduce and regenerate itself becoming something else, I felt so excited that I recovered the will to go on, to resist (like the bacterium) and contaminate! I admit that I had thought about closing ILLUSTRATI.
Just think about the bacterium contained in the gush of saliva that, pushed out of the mouth by the enthusiasm for the tale, ends up in the eye of somebody else carrying the germs of a story which seems to be unimportant but is already reproducing in that moment, and is likely to resist.
I will never see all the countries on this Earth where I live. Nor will I be able to read all the books I have bought. I will be forever ignorant. But it is precisely this movement, of curiosity thoughts atoms dreams desires, that generates and preserve – despite everything – LIFE. A ceaseless movement creating new imaginary and real worlds, which we will never know entirely but that we live to know. To get where, we will never know, we can only guess, and so the game starts again. Every second, every minute, multiplied by each of us, and by all the us that we don’t even know if they exist. All of a sudden the vastness of the universe and his silence fill up with voices. More dreams, more sighs, fancies, theories. Ours. Yours. And theirs, too. Of all those beings that populate the Universe even in the form of some apparently lifeless mineral.
My official thanks to Professor Carlo Pellacani for his enthusiasm and zeal, thanks to Michele Orvieti, our new freelance contributor in charge of the music column EXTRALISCIO, thanks to you all who – in spite of me – keep on participating in the selections, and HAPPY 2017 TO EVERYBODY!