DESERTUM

People who have crossed a desert often describe the same thing. After a while the eye stops finding anything to hold on to. There is heat, sand and light, and far ahead something that looks like water.

It is only air bending over hot ground. You know that, and still the eye keeps going back to it.

Horace, a Roman poet who cared more for wine and gardens than for grand ideas, wrote that we are dust and shadow. Oddly, the same poem is mostly about spring coming back every year. He simply knew that people are not like seasons. We come once.

The desert makes that easy to feel. Everything that matters so much in the city seems far away and slightly unreal, like the lake on the horizon.

What stays is simpler. Water, shade, the person walking next to you.

The rest is a mirage we have agreed to take seriously.