There are nights when the world seems to have surrendered. Cities remain illuminated, screens continue to glow, and millions of fingers slide endlessly across cold glass in search of something they no longer know how to name. Everything happens too quickly. So quickly that sorrow no longer has time to sit beside us.
Let us not allow absurdity to seize the narrative.
Falsehood no longer needs to shout. It now resides in immediacy. In the endless scroll. In that infinite current where everything lasts seconds and nothing endures. If something does not appear on a screen, it seems not to exist. We have traded memory for notifications and wisdom for summaries written in three minutes from distant offices in Silicon Valley, where young executives compress centuries of human thought as though an entire library could be inhaled in a single breath.
Photographs no longer portray people; they portray corrected versions of themselves. Digital retouching has erased wrinkles, fatigue, and truth itself. Those who do not pass through a filter appear condemned to vanish.
Conversations, too, have died. There were once long cafés, winter smoke, endless debates, and laughter powerful enough to rescue an entire evening. Now an emoji summarizes emotion, and an “ok” replaces what used to be hours of shared existence.
Perhaps that is why the centenary of Surrealism feels so profoundly symbolic. That movement sought to open the gates of the subconscious and rescue imagination from an increasingly mechanical world. Yet even the Surrealists ultimately turned against one another. Breton expelled Dalí and Artaud as though every revolution inevitably ends by constructing its own prison.
The situation recalls Konstantinos Kavafis and his poem Waiting for the Barbarians, in which a society requires external enemies in order to avoid confronting its own emptiness. Perhaps we are doing the same. We invent monsters so that we do not have to look directly at our silent decline.
And yet, there is still time.
There are still children capable of being moved by a book. There are still teachers who resist, artists who create without filters, and people who continue to believe in sincere conversation. Culture is not dead; it is merely waiting for us to defend it once again.
Let us fill the libraries again. Let us buy printed books. Let us open schools and rediscover the pleasure of thinking slowly. True content does not live on digital platforms; it lives within our minds, within our memory, and within the courage to share ideas.
The world will continue to belong to those who refuse to accept ignorance as destiny. To those who possess the courage to stop, to read, and to feel amid the noise.
And while blood still runs through our veins, we may yet sever the circuit of ignorance and rekindle the light of culture.
