Numbers without champion

His son had given him that cardboard cup one afternoon on his way home from elementary school. But he hadn't been a champion of anything, and over the years he'd become just a walking shadow. The girl he'd studied with was a professor at a prestigious university, his PhD friend was an academic at Oxford, a former colleague was the director of an NGO, and then there were those who had "made money."

He'd never noticed, but at a certain point, numbers had become a worry for him. The hours weren't spent well, he couldn't keep up, he extracted a grain of satisfaction each day, no more (sometimes a drop from the ocean, a smile from a crowd). Some days he was compulsively lamenting, but it was purely internal: for him, even words were objects to be extracted. He pulled that term hebel (empty) from Qoheleth: his life was insubstantial, evanescent.

As in a poem by Pessoa, he confused numbers and life, form and substance, he became so completely disorganized that he felt more pain than wonder. Until those words of Tagore came upon him: "What are you doing in that dark room with closed doors? Open your eyes and look: your joy is not here. It is not in the numbers. It is with the people who stand under the sun and the rain, who walk the streets, queuing in front of the soup kitchens, under the porticos to shelter from the cold. Take off that cloak of wisdom and descend with them into the dust of the streets." And so, every now and then, he was (and will be) if he can still be a champion of nothing. Gratias, filiolus.


Fabrizio Floris
NP May 2025