49400 - Epistle to the future

N. Lygeros
Translated from the Greek by Vicky Baklesi

Salvatore: I don’t know how things will be in the deep future but I would like you to know that I am thinking about you even now in the most difficult phase of the pandemic. The black plague reaps our people as if their lives were ears of grain. There is nothing that can resist this destruction. But people remain united in the Salutary Year 1350 while we are resisting for three years. Surely they haven’t read Dante’s Comedy but I want to tell you that this helped me because I understood that after hell comes paradise, not that I am afraid to die, since that is how everybody ends but I want to survive the pandemics so that others like yourself who live in the future also know that there were people who lived beside the black plague and survived thanks to the robustness of Mankind. Barbarity will not win and you know why, I will tell you…Time. Today a woman told me that in Venice, habitants on both sides of the Grand Canal decided to play with their mandolins and guitars so the ones listen to the others. At the same time they strolled in the sidewalks and they were heard from window by other people who were living this strange quarantine since nobody was counting the days. Because they thought it didn’t matter. While every day was a gift which you have to take if you want to really live and not only exist. Time. And those people who played music that day lived together because they shared humanity. The instruments managed to cross the Grand Canal while the bridges are forbidden. If I wrote to you about this fact, it is so that it won’t be forgotten. Because even if we die, besides after so many centuries this will have happened to our people. I wrote this phrase but I thought it over. I am indeed making a mistake because even you belong to our people even if we never met up close, I feel you with me, I know that you too are thinking of us even if we are centuries apart. We too seem like those Venetians and our Grand Canal is Time, so even if they have forbidden us the bridges, I want you to listen to the music, because I am sure that you also play an instrument even if it doesn’t exist yet. This is what I finally want to say to you, especially if you too are living a pandemic. I want with my notes, for you to not forget that we survived and that barbarity didn’t succeed, it didn’t manage to annihilate us as black as it may had been. But I want you also to remember that I was thinking of you so that I would be with you in time of need.

Yours

Salvatore