The secret of shape

I remember when I started my personal quest for the secret of shape; I was just a boy of 4 or 5, more than a generation ago. Bent above the kindergartner desk, during my first scary loneliness; or laying on the floor, at home, investigating those wonderful images of extinct creatures that kept relentlessly their mistery, as gods of an unreachable pantheon.

I have never ended this quest, even when I left my pencil, even when I became miserably sick, both in mind and body; and after all those years, through all this suffering and some sporadic sparkle of joy, I’ve finally realized that I have continuously pursued shape, whether it was the profile of a gear or the architecture of an enzyme; when I looked with interest at a woman, for the first time, or when I tried to understand a theorem, I have always unconsciously looked for this secret, for the lines that keep the true knowledge. Those lines that you have to find exactly, those tiny layers of graphite that you have to draw without mistakes, otherwise you will miss the truth.

And now that my organism can’t hold back youth anymore, now I know that all is ruled by the implacable secret of shape, from the gravitational field to the orbitals of atoms; I recognize that that lost child was searching for more than a well-crafted, proportionate figure: he was beginning his own quest for the truth.