There was a time, or perhaps that time has always existed, like a motionless backdrop beneath the flow of ages, which men remember only in rare moments of vertigo, when the mind, weary of measuring surfaces, halts trembling before the abyss of ultimate questions. In that suspended hour, a thinker without homeland and without calendar stopped, not to rest, but because any further step would have meant falling. He was not a priest, for no altar was needed; nor a court poet, for his words sought no benevolent ears; nor a prophet, for he carried no message meant for the crowd. He was rather one of those souls that, by deliberate sentence, dwell in the depths: creatures for whom every answer is only a new form of unease, and every certainty a veil too thin to soothe terror. He did not ask who ruled the world, a question fit for slaves and sovereigns, both equally hungry for command, but dared to ask what allowed the world to be. And in formulating this question, he sensed an intimate fracture, like a statue that, in the silence of the museum, discovers it is not marble but sensitive flesh, exposed to pain.
Many were the texts he had consulted, and all of them, with varying insistence, spoke of a face, a voice, a will shaped like ours but swollen to cosmic proportions: a Father seated on a throne of laws, a Judge armed with scales, an Architect drawing perfect circles with the compass of eternity. Yet to him, these figures appeared as idols carved by trembling hands: too human in their wrath, too noisy in their authority, too ravenous for obedience. What he sensed, instead, neither judged nor commanded, neither threatened nor promised.
It permeated.
It permeated everything, without announcing itself. Like water that asks no permission of the sand, like night that does not justify its darkness to the stars. It was presence without a face, necessity without a voice, intimacy without caress. And since the mind, when it pushes beyond the boundary of the sayable, is forced to return disguised as imagination, the thinker had a vision.
He saw rise, not from the ground, but from the very concept of existence, a vast building. It was not built: it happened. It had no foundations, because it rested on what cannot collapse; it had no keystones, because no tension ran through it. Its walls did not reflect light: they contained it, as if darkness itself were a denser form of brightness.
It had four floors, and no staircase truly connected them, except by concession.
On the lowest level, where being becomes weight, friction, resistance, there opened a room of disarming simplicity: nothing in it seemed to want to mean more than it was. The floor, worn by forgotten footsteps, bore the scars of time like an ancient body; the air, heavy with wood and dust, carried the scent of things never questioned. At the center, like a ruler unaware of his domain, stood a chair. Not a throne, not a ceremonial seat, but an ordinary chair, devoid of ornament and memory. And it was precisely this ordinariness that made it terribly real. Anyone who sat in it felt their body rediscover its own measure, as if every bone finally recognized the place assigned to it. Breath slowed, heartbeat steadied, and the world, until a moment before unstable and flickering, ceased to sway: it was the realm of things that demand no interpretation, of surfaces that hide no abyss.
Here the true coincides with the useful, the right with what holds, and existence is but a matter of balance, duration, endurance. On this plane, men are born, work, and die persuaded that there is nothing else, that reality has boundaries as solid as the wood beneath their feet and answers as simple as daily toil. It is the level of mute necessity, where any question exceeding immediate need is perceived as a form of madness or idleness.
And yet, above that plane, like a dream that ignores the sleeper, like a thought forming while the mind believes itself at rest, there was another.
Here there were no objects, only forms not yet incarnate, possibilities held on the edge of being. The air itself seemed taut, vibrating like a string before it is touched, charged with a promise too timid to be fulfilled. Nothing had weight, nothing cast a shadow, yet everything exerted a silent pressure on the mind. Luminous figures moved ceaselessly, bent over invisible tables, tracing lines that left no mark in space but etched deeply in thought: gestures without matter, work without residue, yet one could sense the urgency of a cosmic workshop. They debated passionately about curves and angles, secret proportions, harmonies no carpenter could ever measure with a ruler or square. Their voices, if they could be called voices, did not resonate in the air, but intertwined like equations, like deductions that generate one another.
Here one did not build: one defined. They did not touch the chair: they conceived it. They deconstructed it into idea, function, symbol. They questioned the meaning of sitting, that ancient and universal gesture that interrupts man’s verticality and returns him, for a moment, to the earth’s gravity. They analyzed the relationship between rest and fall, support and surrender, the act of bending the knees and the tacit acknowledgment of a limit. In this place, reality was not what withstands the hand, but what resists oblivion; not what endures in time, but what can be remembered even when time fails.
And yet, even in that intellectual fervor, even in that dance of pure concepts and untainted geometries, a subtle unease persisted, like a buzzing beneath song. For every form, however perfect, knew it was not yet complete; and every idea, in its own splendor, carried the secret premonition of having to descend, one day, to a plane higher, or more terrible, than that of mere comprehension.
Higher still, beyond a boundary few even dared conceive, a threshold that separated not places but states of being, extended the third level.
Here thought did not rule, but primordial desire, anterior to every form and posterior to every concept. A single presence saturated the space, vast and immobile as a mountain that had learned the secret of thinking without ever forgetting the weight of its mass. It did not design, did not construct, did not analyze: it looked. And in that gaze, which sought nothing and yet contained everything, there was an ancient fatigue, older than the things it observed. It contemplated the lower planes and understood them both without confusing them. It felt the weight of the chair without ever touching it, knew the idea without needing to articulate it: within itself it gathered the density of wood and the lightness of concept, the labor of the body and the clarity of mind, and yet, in the depths of that silent vastness, like a whisper not yet brave enough to become voice, a simple and terrible sentence was born:
I would like to sit.
Not to rest a body, for it had no body, but to quell a cosmic tension, an internal pressure that precedes every gesture and outlasts every accomplishment. It was the will that generates worlds and, after generating them, finds itself weary of its own power. It was the impulse that calls form into existence and, in the very instant it creates it, surpasses it: here the real yielded neither to form nor to thought; it moved like a dark, relentless summons, a primordial tremor that could be grasped by neither gesture nor mind.
And finally, beyond every gaze that could still be called such, beyond every formulable aspiration, beyond even the very concept of height, which there dissolved like a useless habit, lay the fourth plane.
No walls defined it, for there was nothing that could be contained. No figures inhabited it, for every form, upon arriving, dissolved. It was a sea of shifting vapors, a fire without flames, a stillness so absolute it had never known sound. There was no consciousness as men understand it, with its reflections and fractures, nor unconsciousness as they fear, charged with voids and loss. There were pure states: pleasure without object, peace without opposition, relaxation without body, conditions that did not occur but endured.
Here one did not say “I”.
Here one did not even say “being”.
And as the thinker tried in vain to grasp that place with the last tools of the mind, he shivered in understanding that his initial question had been ill-posed. He had asked where the divine was, who it was, to which plane it belonged, as if it could be located, named, assigned a dwelling.
But the divine dwelled in no level: it was what made the levels themselves possible.
Then the building shifted before his eyes. It did not change shape: it changed meaning. The rooms, the figures, the vapors: all that had seemed content revealed itself to depend on something that had remained invisible precisely because it was everywhere.
The walls.
Not those that separate, but those that support. Not those that imprison, but those that allow space. They ran through every plane without belonging to any. They were not objects of worship, for they promised no salvation; not objects of thought, for they could not be conceptualized; not objects of desire, for they offered no satisfaction. And yet, without them, nothing could exist: neither below nor above, neither within nor without, neither in the weight of matter nor in the rarefaction of spirit.
The thinker then understood why anthropomorphic gods had always disappointed the deepest minds: because they were attempts to sit in the chair, to inhabit a room, to dominate a plane. But what he had glimpsed does not sit, does not design, does not desire, does not enjoy.
It supports.
And when the vision faded, the man returned to the world of men. He saw chairs, architects, tired dreamers, and souls seeking peace. He said nothing of what he had seen, for walls do not like to be named. But from that day on, wherever he went, he walked as one who knows that the floor is not the ultimate truth, and that even the sky, however high, needs something unseen not to collapse.
And this, if ever there was a revelation, was all.
This article was originally written in Italian. If you want to read the original: Oltre il respiro.