Years ago, I found a labyrinth and meaningless phrase in a book, and to read it I still feel the headache: “It is rare that it is awake when Danny is still sleeping, especially since I’m pregnant”. The literal meaning is “at night I sleep, and also Danny”, with the interesting state of the protagonist used as a fake patch on the robber’s nose, to confuse eye witnesses. The result is a perfect non-sense, an involuntary stylistic enigma, such as the impossible scales of Escher (here) or the triangle of Penrose (here).

That crazy phrase ‘indecipherable made me back to mind Umberto Eco in the pendulum of Foucault: “Behave as a stupid and you will become impenetrable for eternity.” It is the strategy of many charlatans, but also of some contemporary prophets, magicians, commentators and experts in Tivvù.

Thanks to their work, the West fell into the trap of the perfect non-sense. In 2021 (one year dotted with tragic evaluation errors, who reported the war in Europe) Fundamental news were obscured by the media, making the subsequent events incomprehensible, and in the current rhetoric “without causes”. The third world war may have already begun, but we are still here to ask ourselves if Danny sleeps.

One of the most painful aspects of my father’s last weeks is that he didn’t know where he was. He repeated “I want to go back to my house”, yet he was already there, between walls he had lived for more than sixty years. Perhaps today we are all like him, lost in a house that we no longer recognize, with pieces of our world lost on the street, like the puzzle head in the advertising on the Alzheimer’s (here).