Crick. Crack

Can you hear it—the sound the world is making? A brittle crick-crack, like the skin of a frozen lake held under the blast of a giant hairdryer. Vast plates of ice begin to shear and drift, shaken awake from the deep sleep in which they lay entombed.

This is the moment to start understanding. We only ever understand from the end of something. Here, it is the end of an illusion: the—more often than not hypocritical—fantasy of a perfect world, of virtuous intentions and shining ideals placed up there, higher and higher still, in the lofty heights.

The truth is always down below. To see it, one must wade through lies and ruses, evasions, bullying, violence and deceit—get one’s hands dirty. The unsettled, storm-lashed weather of our time is the weather of truth: looked at without lowering our eyes, without fixing them on a ghost.

It is the time of thought and speech, unshackled at last—not to rehearse what we ought to be, but to describe, with meticulous precision, what we are.

From Ukraine to Venezuela, not a single value remains untouched—none of those values that, until yesterday, were wheeled out to thunder at every turn that we are different. That we are something else.

We are not.

For all its uncertainty and fear, this is an age of truth. Of great truths.

Crack. Crack.

(gianluca grossi)