While every effort has been made to accurately translate this article from its original Italian version, some nuances in meaning may differ. If you wish to explore the original text, you can find it here: Nella memoria del nostro futuro.

The path skirted the river like an old reflection that the earth had never quite managed to forget: there are places where nature seems to possess a melancholy intelligence, and that stretch of the bank, in that uncertain hour between sunset and night, certainly belonged to such places. The elms bent their branches over the dark water with the posture of ancient thinkers hunched over a secret, and the current, slow yet incessant, carried copper-colored leaves toward invisible regions, leaves that whirled for a few moments in the eddies before disappearing beneath the shadow of the willows.

In the west, the sky had preserved a streak of golden paleness, like the final memory of a fallen royalty, but over the river those premature mists were already thickening, rising from the water in autumn with a silent obstinacy, veiling the landscape not like a curtain, but like a thought.

And I walked, with no precise destination.

There are hours when the soul, oppressed by an anxiety it cannot name, instinctively flees from illuminated rooms, human voices, and habitual occupations, seeking refuge instead alongside the eternal elements: the sea, the mountains, the woods, or the slow flow of a river. This was how ancient men consulted oracles; not to receive answers, but to hear more clearly the tumult hidden within themselves.

It was then that I saw him.

He was moving along the edge of the path with a stride so regular it seemed a stranger to fatigue. He had neither the gait of an ordinary traveler nor the severe bearing of churchmen who take pleasure in their own austerity: there was something remote and almost impersonal in his movement, as if his body obeyed a rhythm vaster than mere human impulse. He wore a dark tunic bound at the waist by a faded rope, and carried upon his shoulders a mantle whose fabric, worn by time and the weather, took on here and there the color of wet ash. His head was bare. His hair, completely white, fell to his neck in thin strands that the wind barely lifted. But what struck me most were his hands: singularly quiet hands with long, pale fingers, gripping an ebony staff polished by use with the natural ease of someone who has carried the same thought for many years.

He passed me without turning around.

And yet, almost immediately, I had the absurd though entirely distinct feeling that his presence had altered the very atmosphere of the place. The river seemed to flow more silently. The mist, thickening among the trees, softened the contours of things until they resembled memories. Even the sound of my footsteps on the gravel reached me as if from a great distance. I unconsciously quickened my pace. The man showed no surprise upon hearing me catch up to him. On the contrary, he continued forward with his eyes fixed ahead, where the path lost itself in a curve shrouded in silvery vapors.

For a few minutes we did not speak.

At times the wind stirred the reedbeds along the bank, producing a low, intermittent rustling, like the whispering of invisible people. Somewhere, far off on the other shore, a dog barked just once; then silence stretched out over the landscape once more, with that particular gravity belonging to autumn evenings.

Finally, the old man said, “Men always walk as if they fear arriving too late.”

His voice possessed a surprisingly youthful timbre. It was neither deep nor particularly strong, yet it seemed to pierce the air with the clarity of a bell heard through the fog.

“Perhaps because time waits for no one,” I replied almost automatically.

A slight smile brushed his face.

“Ah… time.”

He pronounced that word slowly, the way one utters the name of someone known for a long time. We continued walking. Beneath our feet, the ground grew damper. Gnarled roots emerged here and there from the black earth like the limbs of buried creatures. The water reflected the final glimmers of the sky in broken streaks that the current incessantly deformed.

“Look at the river,” the monk said after a long silence.

I obeyed.

“What do you see?” “Water flowing.” “No. You see only your way of perceiving it.”

I turned toward him. He kept his eyes fixed on the current with that motionless attention sometimes observed in old astronomers contemplating the night sky.

“You believe that the river moves toward the sea,” he continued, “because you are forced to follow it moment by moment. But imagine being able to lift your gaze high enough, high enough to see simultaneously the source among the mountains, the bends in the fields, the city bridges, and finally the mouth. Would you still say that the river goes somewhere?”

I did not answer right away: the question had something childish and yet deeply unsettling about it.

“I would say it exists all at once,” I admitted at last. “Precisely.”

A thicker mist glided over the water.

For a few moments, the landscape seemed to dissolve; the trees lost their substance, the sky vanished, and we remained as if suspended in a formless space where only the sound of the current continued to bear witness to the existence of the world.

“Men invented time to endure eternity,” the monk continued. His words were not spoken with emphasis. They fell into the silence with the simplicity of something that required no proof.

“And yet,” I replied, “we feel time. We see it consume everything.” “You see change. Not time.”

The old man slowly lowered his head, as if listening to a voice coming from the water itself.

“Cathedrals crumble, faces grow old, roses wither… and men call all this ‘time,’ just as children attribute the noises of the night to an invisible creature. But perhaps time is nothing more than the way a limited mind traverses something motionless.”

Those words produced a singular sensation in me, similar to what one feels when staring too long at a starry sky: a mixture of vertigo and attraction.

The path now bent near a cluster of willows. Their long fronds brushed the dark water, producing circles that widened slowly in the current. The moon, still low, was beginning to rise behind a curtain of vapors, and its milky light transformed the landscape into an almost surreal vision.

“Tell me,” the monk resumed, “have you ever had the impression that certain moments of your life had already happened?”

I hesitated.

“Do you mean a déjà-vu?” “No. Something more subtle. The sudden feeling that a moment does not belong to you entirely as a novelty… but as a memory.”

His voice dropped.

“…as if the soul recognized what the mind encounters for the first time.”

The wind ceased. For a moment the river seemed to hold its breath.

“Perhaps,” I said slowly, “it happens to everyone.” “Yes. But few pay attention to it.”

The monk raised his eyes toward the moon.

Its light fell upon the old man’s face, highlighting his deep wrinkles; and yet, there was no impression of decay about him. He seemed rather like one of those ancient statues that time wears away without ever managing to strip them of their authority.

“Men live convinced that the future is a non-existent region toward which they advance in the dark,” he continued, “and for this reason, they are afraid. But what if the future were already present, invisible and complete, like the landscape hidden behind the mist?”

He fell silent. From the other bank came the melancholy call of a night bird.

“Then every choice would already be written,” I observed.

The old man offered a faint smile.

“Written… It is too rigid a word. Think of it rather as music.”

I remained silent.

“A symphony exists all at once in the score,” he continued, “yet it is heard note after note. The listener experiences the succession of sounds; the composer, however, simultaneously knows both the beginning and the end.”

We continued walking. His words did not possess the aggressive character of philosophical theories. They did not attempt to convince. They crept into the mind slowly, like the mist rising from the river, imperceptibly altering the shape of things.

“But then,” I asked after a moment, “what purpose does desire serve?”

The monk stopped beside a fallen trunk covered in moss. He brushed the damp bark with his fingers. He smiled.

“There are desires born of lack,” he said, “and desires born of memory.”

The phrase seemed obscure to me. He continued: “Some men chase wealth, loves, glories, like starving beggars outside the illuminated windows of a banquet. Others, however, advance toward the very same things with a strange serenity, as if deep down they already knew they belonged to them.”

He slowly raised his eyes toward me.

“Have you ever observed those who seem to achieve the improbable? There is often an almost irritating calm in them. They do not act like someone desperately trying to obtain something, but like someone who merely arrives at a place they have long known.”

The current struck against some submerged stones, producing a continuous, hypnotic murmur.

“And do you believe that certainty changes destiny?” “I believe that certain souls move through time with greater swiftness than others.”

He pronounced those words without altering his tone, but I distinctly felt a shiver run down my spine. The mist had become so dense that the path appeared now only a few paces ahead of us. Walking gave the impression of stepping through a dream.

“Look,” said the monk, pointing to the moon reflected in the water. The current continuously broke the silvery image, yet it reappeared intact at every moment.

“External reality resembles that reflection. Men believe it to be stable; instead, it changes incessantly according to the movement of the consciousness observing it.” “Are you speaking of imagination?” “No. Imagination is merely a door.”

He resumed his walk.

“There are men who remember their own past with such intensity that they remain prisoners to it their entire lives. They relive old wounds, ancient humiliations, lost loves… and their spirit remains immobilized in what no longer exists.”

He turned slightly toward me.

”…But there are also men capable of remembering the future.”

He added nothing more. And it was precisely that silence, more than the words themselves, that rendered the sentence extraordinarily unsettling.