In the darkness filling the room, the flashes that split the sky are almost frightening to watch through the window. It almost feels as if the sky were seeking revenge for an ancient wrong.
But the storm does not come by chance: it is caused by a man, standing alone before all his machines. And it is together with them that he tries to give shape to his thought. His thought is his fire.
The fire burns within him, nourishes him and feeds on him in return. And it is all he has.
Yet fire can burn too strongly and consume everything around it: the ancients understood this long ago. They knew that the heat of technique warms, illuminates, and saves the human. But it can also harm him.
For this reason, they chose to chain Prometheus, fearing that his flame might dissolve the order of the world—an order they already recognized as fragile.
We, instead, have set Prometheus’ fire free. We have broken the ancient injunction to keep it confined, and since its release we have demanded everything from it: to extend us, to give shape and breath to the multitudes that inhabit us, to our capacity to imagine. To build visions, worlds, illusions.
We have become taller than our own desires. And from that height, excess emerges—the doing without purpose that continues even when the “why” has already faded.
Today, our capacity to create moves faster than our capacity to understand. The power is immense. But power, without limits, slips into arbitrariness. It expands everywhere without asking where it is going.
For this reason, we must submit ourselves to necessity. To that necessity which excludes, defines, orients. That reminds us that art is not born from infinite possibility, but from the infinite we choose to withhold.
Technology can do anything. It can ignite a thousand lights, construct a perfect tree, and make it shine like a promise.
But choosing the why—the meaning of that gesture—remains a fragile, slow, and irreducibly human task.
Because what is born without purpose has no meaning. It is not great, and it never can be.
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