"There is a time to born. A time to die.
A time to love. A time to throw stones.
A time to tear and a time to mend.
A time to make love and a time to part."
And these words were sung a long time ago.
Roughly 2500 years ago.
with a cithara, tuned with the "Seven Strings",
as the Qoelets cithara was nicknamed.
And each of those strings, prepared with sheep entrails,
was to be tuned with constellations and planets.
For the time we experience
is a personal one that grows within oneself
until it becomes part of the cosmos' own time.
Defining "Kohelet", wisdom,
has always been a conundrum.
Man has always chased after it, always looked for it,
always attempted to solve it.
Today, I introduce myself a bit like an Alice's "White Rabbit".
A small watch in my pocket
that somehow captures both my time and yours.
Time is mostly a pace.
We understood it
while still in our mother's amniotic fluid,
as we listened to the beat,
the beat of her heart, the beat of our heart.
Our ancestors, the Latins, invented almost everything.
Cultural sponge as they were
of that once great Mediterranean civilization,
obviously an extremely porous environment,
filled with many stimuli,
which they transformed
into the rhythm of their "Dactylic Hexameter".
The hexameter was the way
of singing the heart's beat;
it's the verse of Epic Poetry.
But underneath the verse of Epic Poetry,
recorded along the extraordinary folds of ancient manuscripts,
lies an ancient, primordial music.
And you can hear it.
It's within you right as we speak.
Your heart may beat harder or softer,
but it's always the same.
"Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum."
What is it?
It's the beat of a hors ride.
A wild, frightening cavalcade, an extraordinary advance of riders,
who chant and swiftly cross the planes of Troy as a hoof,
with a galloping sound,
shakes the crumbling field.
That isn't impressive in Italian,
yet "Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum. "
enhances the rhythm even more
and the rhythm turns into a frenzy, and this frenzy into a song of passion.
In perhaps the most beautiful night in Latin Literature,
the night described by Ovidius in "Tristia".
When Ovidius must leave,
due to an emperor’s will
that denies him the fact
that he saw something which he was not supposed to see.
It is during this very last night,
spent between the arms of the woman he loves -
and what time is better spent after all-
Ovidius, lost in the curls of her hair,
sang to the beat of those passing moments,
and each grain of sand that descended in the hourglass,
became a whisper of love
sung for an eternity, as it became eternal.
"Lente, lente currite noctis eques!"
"Oh, run slowly, slowly, horses of the night,
because if the night slips away too quickly,
and if the dawn rises too quickly,
I will have to whisper farewell to you, my sweet love.
May that moment never come."
It is by hands and feet
that death can be deceived within a dance.
Within a dance, accompanied by the shaman's tambourine and cymbal,
we can repeat the rhythm of that ancient Hexameter.
If you paid attention,
if we were in an estranged time, if we were in a different place
not too far from here, within the hills of the Friulian moraine,
and if we found ourselves around 1568-1570.A.C.,
a musician, necromancer and magician who we all know well,
Giorgio Mainerio,
The famous Choirmaster of the Holy Church of Aquileia,
whose patriarchs still reside within this building, suspended in time.
We can almost hear them.
With bagpipes
in hand and feet clapping, with the beat of clapping feet,
they would search for the systole and diastole,
for that pendulum, which can enthral the moon.
So that, as Slovenian witches of that time would do,
it could somehow stop
along the estranged chain of mountains and hills
and somehow stop for an instant.
"To Enchant", means to chant from within the real meaning of things,
and to enthral, even for a single instant,
which however can last as much as an eternity,
the sense of the flow of time, or at least the memory of it,
so that it may stop time and deceive Death,
which of course waits in vain within this dance.
That is all there is to it.
"It's a time to be."
It's a delicate balance
between "Eros", love, and "Energeia", that is energy,
which they mentioned before when talking about time and the cosmos,
and "Thanatos" that is death.
In the Middle Age "Books of Hours",
death was portrayed with a delicate silver crown
and reminds us, without scaring us,
that it will appear at the end of our existence -
but not to punish us!
It will show up and ask us
if our time was a well spent one.
If the time we invested in our lives
was a time filled with things, with encounters,
a distilled excitement.
This is what that dark lady will ask us.
And that is it,
within the magnificence of a space, which also becomes time -
notice how seamlessly the language of theoretical physics
clings so tightly
to that of art, of poetry, of anthropology and of philosophy -
it’s that space, that time,
embroiled between a finger that creates and a finger that was created.
Within a sense of “Humanitas”,
which is related to "humus" but also "mano" [hand].
It's with our opposable thumb,
that allows us to perceive ourselves, maybe for the first time,
as creators or sub-creators that shape structures and meanings,
that we are enabled to hold our time between our grasp.
And that is within a spark of Michelangelo.
In that very sleepy, dreaming Adam.
He dreams because he still does not live.
And he does not live yet because he doesn't have a sense of time,
which is all wrapped within the mystery of our origins.
Who existed before Adam? After Adam, who will exist?
Adam, the man who gives names to things and steals the soul of the world,
who makes himself a grain of time and eventually returns to a grain of dust
within the meaning of things.
This might be my favourite example.
It is my favourite because within this kiss,
which Greek vase painting
captures beautifully from the first Polis,
we are talking around 8th century B.C.,
within this vase there is a kiss that has lasted for more than 2000 years.
And it has lasted for 2000 years, 2800 years,
as this was never traded.
The time of that kiss
becomes an eternal moment between two people.
Exactly like the finger of God
that descend from the infinite and transforms the infinite into present,
and gives it a sense and strength of being wonderful, here and now.
The great poet Keats sang this
in his famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn ”,
and this is that very urn.
But, what does that suspended time consist of?
I am sure that all of you have ever tasted
the essence of that time, which precedes a kiss.
For that's when a waft becomes a breath
and a breath turns into "anemos", wind.
And the wind becomes spirit
and those spirits merge and become a tepid vapour.
And that tepid vapour becomes an emotion
and that emotion is meant to be shared, yet distilled slowly.
Like Rostand once said,
the bee sucks the honey from the flower's corolla,
but before this moment can even happen,
that's where all the sweetness of the honey is found,
in a kiss that wasn't given,
which will last in the course of time, which will last forever.
And so, Horace, inspired by such a style,
during a winter's night, when time seemed endless,
he tells his love Leuconoe, with long black hair:
"Loosen, loosen them for me in this very instant,
allow dreams to remain suspended below, your eyelashes,
near the border of your eyes.
Do never worry about the time that Zeus could have granted us.
Don't ask yourself how many more winters
will tire Adriatic's enraged waves.
May this moment, this very instant, which precedes our kisses,
be our time for all eternity.
Generously pour into the cup the Sabine wine
than let's share this wine, along with our love,
which by lasting the whole night, will essentially last forever.
And John Dowland,
one of the great poets of the Elizabethan age,
in this dimension of music,
which repeats the sense of Qoelet and Jewish cithara.
Within a musical structure which speaks of life, love,
instants, fleeting moments
and emotions and afflicting worries,
we sings intertwining in his scores
a wonder, which is once again the wonderment of a song,
it's his "Come Again."
"Come again, sweet and kind love,
[translates]
so that my night isn't restful,
but full of dreams"
And what are we, as echoed by his famous countrymen echoed,
if not a collection of dreams,
a mixture which seams our lives.
A dream can appear long a lifetime to us, as long as an undefined time.
And life can be short and sweet,
like only a dream can be.
It is the waiting,
it is the waiting that can allow us to transform memory into will,
that allows us to give sense and meaning
to the things we experience.
All literature and philosophy play with the concept of waiting.
Waiting does not mean wasting time:
it means having the opportunity to savour it all the way.
Today we have no time.
We run after this "Moving contraption, with its toothed gears,
as it grinds up the day and chops it down to hours",
Ciro di Pers, our Ciro di Pers,
who probably dwelled here long ago, singing his times.
We fear waiting.
Our waiting rooms are a place of misery.
We have transformed our lives
into waiting for something that will never arrive.
Transforming our present into nothing,
trapped between the idea of a future, which still does not exist yet
and a past that no longer exists.
They have no meaning
if not in our meek present,
which swiftly transforms the future into past.
Through memories we can discern who we truly are, who we aspire to be;
and most importantly, how we choose to become that person.
And this here, is the flash of a myth, of a ritual.
Within the Cueva de las Manos, in Mexico.
This man from 12000 B.C.
left a trace of time, around the colour of his hand.
The excitement, because you are allowed to,
of placing your hand on that print
opens some sort of spacetime fascination,
where these 12000 years are recapitulated in the touch of a shadow.
A hand’s shadow, that reminds us of something very important.
That we are human beings, just like he used to be,
and we crave for passion;
we have an insatiable need to experience a dimension through time,
which is only ours, because we can perceive it.
Incredibly, some trees are 10000 years old,
with leaves that grow centuries apart from each other -
and yet, they retain no memory of themselves.
By placing my hand on this hand
I sensed that 12000 years are only a moment,
just a heartbeat, an instant.
And so we ask ourselves, much like the psalmist used to sing,
“Watchman, what is left of the night? ”
How long will we have to simply stand and wait?
We should learn to savour the night
to imagine it by listening, surrounded by the shadows around us,
the humming of each strand of grass, as they grows,
the whirring of the stars as these cross the borderless sky,
which is maybe the very whir within us,
the creak of the bench we sit upon.
And never get tired of asking:
"Watchman, what is left of the night?"
Because sooner or later, it will be overtaken
by a feint glimmer, which appears from the East
and which signals us that perhaps our time has come.
Pay attention, because even now my time is slipping away.
Because this is what time is, the "Kairos".
Represented this way by the Greeks.
It is a fleeting moment; it always flees behind us.
It passes us by before we can even know.
However, it has a long curl, which rests upon its forehead
and that's where we must be careful enough to seize it, grab it when it passes by,
welcome it and avoid being caught unprepared.
"Kairos".
You can find it on the coasts of Dalmacia, at Trogir,
perfectly represented there, as it was 2000 years ago.
Grabbing that special moment
means thinking that our life is filled with time,
as in, "life must maintain that fullness of time".
In Seneca's words, "Do not hope to add years to your lives.
Instead, hope to add life to your years."
You may get well beyond 100,
without "living" a single second.
You may live 30 years,10 years, one month, even just a single hour,
and that time can be an untouched, wonderful time
which leaves you with a sense of wonder.
So like the great Faust, who gazed upon an endless sky,
after having made a bargain with our inner Devil.
And each of us has a demon with whom we must come to terms.
Let’s ascend to the tallest
and most solemn spire of our castle,
and seeing that the first lights of dawn are arriving
and signalling to us the end of our time,
we too can say:
"Oh fleeting moment, stay a while! You are so lovely!”.
Thank you. Thank you.
(Applausi)