“The years are flying past and we all waste so much time wondering if we dare to do this or that. The thing is to leap, to try, to take a chance.” — Leonard Cohen

There is something suspicious about places routinely described as “suspended in time”. More often than not, someone simply arrived at precisely the right moment, before the telephone poles went up, the hotels opened and everyone else discovered the same view. The Island of Hydra is one such place. Known as the island where time has stopped, Hydra has long been a place drawing poets and artists towards itself. To follow this particular story, we have to go back to the 1960s, and the bohemian scene of the young artists who were staying there. Back then, the island of Hydra was a land of solitude and of plodding donkeys. Cars were absent, electricity unreliable. It was, in other words, almost perfectly equipped for retrospect, an “eleventh-century life”. In such primitive surroundings, amid the stunning beauties of the island and the glories of the Aegean, where fishermen still wrested a living from the sea and ferries scrabbled one from the land, Leonard Cohen came looking for his alone time, dedicated to writing.

Rumor has it, living unhappily in London, Leonard wandered into a bank one particularly miserable rainy day and noticed the clerk had a suspiciously good tan. Greece, came the answer. Shortly afterwards Leonard was on his way south, buying the house on the sunny island. There was, however, another connection; for Cohen had heard specifically about Hydra through the Rothschild circle and the Greek painter Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, whose ancestral home on the island had already been functioning for decades as a private salon for bohemians colonising the island in search of inspiration and freedom. Henry Miller had stayed at Ghika’s forty-room family mansion, as had figures moving through the interwar and postwar European avant-garde: George Seferis, Lawrence Durrell, John Craxton and Patrick Leigh Fermor among them. Le Corbusier also passed through the orbit. Miller arrived in 1939 and promptly found the island suitable for the sort of ecstatic geographical prose at which he excelled, declaring Hydra a form of “naked perfection.” By the time Cohen arrived two decades later, the supposedly undiscovered island had already been discovered by exactly the kind of people capable of making discovery contagious.

The Mediterranean, widely known for its lifestyle of la vita lenta, offers the kind of isolation writers are looking for: to be alone, away from the civilisation of the large cities, away from daily life, and people from the regimen. Yet, what writers experience in embracing such solitudine is quite different from loneliness, and, therefore, it is highly inspiring: the endurance of novelty. The island of Hydra, with time that had stopped long ago in the past, provided conversations with like-minded people who were seeking such discussions. The modus vivendi was, indeed, the romanticised idea of bohemian artists committed only to art.

They were inspiring one another, having drunk conversations about poetry, followed by yet uncompleted fragments of songs, returning home and, with no mandatory or any other kind of urgent work, they were unfettered enough to write until dawn, to pursue the thought, to lose themselves in l’écriture automatique. The night hours hold the quietness of everything but the mind, and, once set loose, it is within the experiment that the asterpice is formed.

The freedom, they say. The freedom to experience novelty. That was what Hydra offered them: an unexpected novelty in every day, an encounter of like minds, directed to each other. The novelty was all around: new life, new house, new circle. When it all becomes known, the novelty is still there: in thoughts, and in sharing them.

Before Leonard Cohen became what we associate with his name today, he himself arrived among generations of established artists; and was taken seriously by them. Among those were George Johnston, already a recognized writer, and his wife, Charmian Clift. The Johnstons read his manuscripts, discussed them with him, and encouraged him to perform. Leonard was still very young, still thinking of himself almost entirely as a poet and novelist, and bohemian Hydra gave him the rare chance of being unknown without being invisible. He used to spend mornings writing and evenings in conversations with people who were living exactly as he was hoping to live: dedicated to writing. Later, he described the Johnstons as:

His The Favourite Game, Flowers for Hitler and Beautiful Losers belong to the Hydra period.

And then, of course, there were the wires.

—Bird on the Wire

Upon his arrival, they were almost nonexistent. Electricity was limited, and telephones were rare. Eventually, the modernity of the 20th century arrived: poles appeared, followed by the lines themselves, cutting across a view previously free of them. Leonard later recalled staring from his window and thinking that civilisation had caught up with him—that the primordial existence he had imagined escaping into had already begun disappearing. Then the birds settled on the new wires, which eventually became one of his most enduring images.

Bird on the Wire is usually folded into the discography as a song about freedom, guilt and the impossibility of living without hurting anyone along the way. All true enough. Yet its first image is also oddly documentary: a technological object had entered an old landscape; nature immediately incorporated it; the poet watched the event from his window. The lyric began, quite literally, where modernisation crossed the sky. The liberty and the confinement, on the personal side, stay across the escape and inevitable modernity on the island that motivated it.

He was able to stand back from the rush of metropolitan life and devote himself to the questions of life and meaning, get his young life, full and successful as it had been, into perspective. Here he began to crystallize the wisdom of some of his best poetry, writing and songs, or it was here that he was reborn, where he truly began to find himself, where not least, the music of Greece entered his soul, evoking earlier memories and melodies, combining with them to suggest a new style, a new mystique. And it was here that he met Marianne Ihlen, who soon became his muse and his partner.

—So Long, Marianne

Together with her husband, known as the “Jack Kerouac of Norway”, 25 years old by then, Marianne came to the island. Shortly after their arrival, the ideal of freedom separated them, leaving Marianne alone with her baby son Axel. The profound friendship she had developed with Leonard soon grew into a romantic relation, with Marianne taking care of him, and Leonard providing for her and little Axel. Apparently, they used to have a happy period together, which motivated many of Cohen’s famous songs. She was his muse, controversial as it may seem today, as in the absence of electricity and other signs of modern civilisation, the role of the muse was to take care of such things too: providing candles, so that writers could spend their long sleepless nights capturing their inspiration. From a contemporary perspective, such polarisation of gender roles is less seen as romantic and is getting far more questioned, but shall we even judge the past by today’s morality?

The years of bohemian liberty came close to an end when Leonard moved to New York (after a short stay in Canada), disappointed with the inability to maintain his living out of writing, having Marianne and Axel join him. Yet, he was pursuing a career as a singer and songwriter, living in Hotel Chelsea in the midst of the turbulent years of youthful expression. As he claimed to her, it wasn’t her scene at all. Naturally, the differences in their lifestyle and long-term compatibility led to their separation—the one that, as it goes, leaves a deep and profound memory. Not only did she continue to appear, as a name and reference, in his poems, but they remained connected through financial support and letters for a lifetime. A cache of more than 50 love letters between Ihlen and Cohen sold for $870,000 at Christie’s auction, with the money supposed to have helped secure Axel Jnr’s future (who, unfortunately, suffered from mental disturbances and spent most of his life in institutions).

Just before her death in July 2016, Leonard sent an email to his former lover, which a friend read out to Ihlen. It said:

He died four months later. The relationship’s legacy was a catalogue of classic songs – So Long Marianne, Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Bird on the Wire – a great deal of heartache, but also a lasting sense of the creative power of love. Both of them, looking back on their relationship, named it a “gift”.

—Death of a Ladies’ Man

The generation of the wild 60s, seemingly hungry for life, had long observed the connection between freedom and responsibility—or the consequences one’s free will has on others. The perspective mirrors Cohen’s relationship with Marianne in many ways. Their life on Hydra was built around an ideal of personal liberty; the one of love without ownership. While such is imagined as the ultimate state, almost as the description of what a relationship shall be, with no jealousy, and with mutual respect between the partners, in reality, occasionally, it turned out to be harder to behold. As if it was a paravan for one side to enjoy multiple connections and to set free his curiosity towards others (romantically or physically involved), while the other one was put on hold, waiting for love. Among many other terms, the conception of freedom, and love alongside it, was tested, leading towards the interpretation not that it is impossible to be free without hurting others, nor that the traditional form of devotion regardless of the circumstances was the only way to love others—rather, the “experimental” couples of the 60s broke the illusion of expecting a lifelong partnership. Or, preferably, having such an expectancy at all, pointing out that we are all free: free to choose how we love someone, and free to leave in order to stay devoted to our own growth. Maybe the hurting does not come from the act of breakup, as much as it comes out of dependency on the other (and, as far as we know, we cannot control anyone but our own self).

—Hydra and Cinema

The same period of Cohen’s bohemian living on Hydra was captured in various filmatic narratives. Cinema had noticed the romantic isolation of the island even slightly earlier. In 1956 Michael Cacoyannis filmed A Girl in Black on Hydra, using the island not as an idyll but as something considerably darker. Ellie Lambeti’s Marina moves through a small society governed by scrutiny, reputation and cruelty; even leaving the house exposes her to harassment. The film became one of Greece’s first major international art-house successes and offered audiences a Hydra in which dazzling sunlight did very little to improve human behaviour.

A year later Hollywood arrived and, with admirable efficiency, produced an almost entirely different island.

Jean Negulesco’s Boy on a Dolphin, starring Sophia Loren in her English-language debut, cast her as a poor sponge diver who discovers an ancient statue beneath the sea. Shot partly on Hydra in lavish CinemaScope, the film transformed the same economic realities—sponge fishing, poverty, antiquity—into exotic spectacle. Loren emerges wet from the Aegean; the island gleams; Greece becomes available as desire. It was the first Hollywood feature shot extensively in the country and helped disseminate abroad an image that Mediterranean tourism would spend the following decades perfecting.

| Written in the dawn of Mediterranean summer. Love,

Greta

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Entering the world of Mark Rothko

Rather than depicting objects, Rothko painted the experience of colour itself. Thin, translucent layers of pigment create soft-edged forms whose boundaries dissolve into the surrounding canvas, producing an atmosphere of light, depth, and suspension. The large scale of the paintings invites close viewing until the colour fills the viewer’s field of vision, transforming the canvas into an immersive encounter. For Rothko, these subtle chromatic transitions were not decorative effects but a means of communicating directly with human emotion, beyond language or narrative. The dimensions of the paintings were chosen to invite the observer to come closer, in order to free him from any bond with predetermined conventions taken for granted.

At Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the exhibition takes place across several halls, following the artist’s development over the years: from his figurative beginnings towards finding his jouissance in pursuing colour forms, and the way they directly influence our emotions. The commencement is cheerful: yellow tones on red and orange; all hues that make us feel joyful, positive, and, somewhere deeper down, happy to be there. As the viewing progresses, it changes towards blue and green, into some kind of tranquillity and peacefulness. The luminosity of the earlier years gave way to deep, cooler, more subdued tones, signalling a new phase of introspection. In these works, colour seems to turn inward, creating a dense atmosphere of suspension and quiet reflection.

With the indication of what is yet to come?

Maybe, but still not directly.

The emergence of the dark red and brown tonalities, derived from the weathered reds of Roman walls and the enveloping stillness of those spaces, creates a space of compressed luminosity, evoking a meditation on the endurance of light within darkness. These canvases confront the viewer with a concentrated intensity, and the emotion is held at the edge of darkness. Unlike his previous phases, the gaze upon this series feels heavier, almost in conversation with the most unbearable sensations.

His reading of Søren Kierkegaard and Sigmund Freud informed a deeper exploration of the psychological dimensions of colour and space.

The work invites anyone who observes it to abandon every attachment, to forget even themselves, and to immerse themselves in another dimension—imaginary, dreamlike.

The meaning of art

Abstract forms in art have long provoked the search for their interpretations. Standing in front of a gigantic canvas covered with an unidentified colour space, the observer, in his most natural state, looks for its meaning: what it represents. Partly due to the awareness of art history’s long connection to hidden messages, painting has become almost impossible to look at, or to “understand,” without knowing its deeper context.

The interaction, known as “presence and place,” points to the experience that happens only in the direct gazing at the image. Something that occurs only in the present moment, and that is, in its way, “unique” — for everyone encounters it differently. The paintings have no shapes, objects, or figures to look at. It is an abstract space of colour, defined only by the borders of the canvas. Yet, stepping closer, the limits disappear, which is where the personal narration begins. Somehow, the “reputation” makes us await the pure sensation, or raw feelings, to take over our minds. Yet, what happens is quite unexpected, and reveals the nature of human emotions. The feelings we sense are directly connected to thought. No matter how hard we might try, we cannot shut down our brains, which constantly search for associations in familiar things. By observing the surroundings, in one instant the viewer starts noticing the depth of what is beyond his gaze, as if the object in front of him were not the image after all, but an infinite space. The colour, after a while, recalls a thought, an association, and the longer we let it develop, the clearer the sentiment becomes.

The full saturation of the space recalls a certain memory. While looking across the image, the reflection develops, and the details, no matter how blurred they might have seemed before, become clearer in our minds. An association, provoked by the emotional range of the colour, continues to create the feeling inside us. As we gaze across the surface, we notice traces of other pigments, or the hazy edges translating into another tone—creating a new reminiscence of a similar emotional spectrum. That way, we get wrapped up in the thought of our own minds, reflecting on our own lives, facing what we suppressed, and connecting seemingly opposite moments into a wider sense of our personal lives, and of our own memoir. Two people standing in front of the same painting describe it in completely different ways, because what they see, or what an image “represents” to them, differs in the same way that they differ from one another.

For one person, No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow) might begin as the memory of a summer evening, when the last light settles over the sea and the horizon dissolves into warm bands of gold and crimson. At first, the painting carries the same stillness: the quiet certainty that nothing more is required from the moment than to remain within it. As the gaze wanders, the calm begins to reveal everything that once surrounded it—the awareness that even the most perfect evening passes, and fades into reminiscence. The deep red ceases to be only warmth; it becomes the slow weight of longing, spreading gently across the surface without ever overwhelming it. And still, suspended above it, the luminous white interrupts the descent, like the stubborn persistence of possibility. The kind that hopes some irreducible part of us continues to believe that another evening, another encounter, another beginning remains conceivable. The painting makes space for both serenity and melancholy to coexist inside us. Just as they often do in life, where beauty is inseparable from the knowledge that it cannot be held.

It is rather defined in the very moment of interplay—it is something we create for ourselves, based on our own thoughts, which is why, after all, “painting is looking back at us.”

Florence: the origin of a way of seeing

On one of his travels to Italy, Mark Rothko spent several afternoons in Florence’s Convent of San Marco, where Fra Angelico’s luminous frescoes and the contemplative atmosphere of the monastic cells left a lasting impression on him. Rather than inspiring specific compositions, San Marco offered a different understanding of what painting could become: not simply an object to be viewed, but a space for contemplation and self-discovery. He would later speak of his desire to create intimate chapels centred around a single painting—an ambition that echoes the quiet devotional experience he first encountered within the walls of San Marco. Precisely for that reason, part of Florence’s retrospective includes his smaller paintings being exhibited alongside the frescoes that motivated them. Unlike the curatorial conventions of retrospectives, which typically follow an artist through distinct periods, here we witness the evolution of the artist’s own vision by being able almost to follow his own mind and the development of the idea after encountering the object that became its artistic point of departure.

With that in mind, such an arrangement also gives us a reason to rethink the ways of seeing museums. Quite the opposite of their formal understanding as places that preserve conclusions, here they preserve questions, and provoke further thinking.

While provenance and technique are readily reconstructed, we seldom attempt to exhibit the ideas from which a work emerged. In and of itself, Florence’s retrospective suggests that, once the source of inspiration becomes part of the display, looking acquires an unexpected reciprocity. We no longer observe only the finished artwork; we begin to observe observation itself: the artist ceases to be solely the one who is looked at, and becomes someone whose way of looking also enters the exhibition.

Epilogue

We have become accustomed to approaching art as something to interpret, decode for its secrets, or explain through the artist’s intention. Yet some works resist that impulse entirely, asking nothing of our intellect before they ask something of our emotions. Mark Rothko believed that a painting was not a representation of an experience, but an experience in itself. He was not interested in colour or form as formal exercises, but in their ability to communicate the most fundamental human emotions directly. Standing before his paintings in Florence, I began thinking that perhaps the most profound works of art are not those that tell us what to think, but those that make us feel something before we have found the words for it. Maybe we have spent too long asking what art means, and not long enough asking what it allows us to feel.

| Written in the dawn somewhere in Florence. Love,

Greta

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There was once a lovely, frightened girl. She lived alone, except for a nameless cat.

Somehow expectedly, there is only one image crossing our minds when reading this excerpt: mid-day, feeling like early morning, somewhere in New York, a young woman gets woken up by a stranger’s bell ring — and a big ginger cat jumping on her bed.

The scene is just the beginning of the iconic film, with the equally iconic character of Holly Golightly. Played by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), she soon became known as a fashion icon. Indeed, Givenchy dresses, huge glasses hiding the day after stare, a nonchalant trench and the chicest hats certainly played the role of making the character so effortlessly elegant. Yet, what was around her was even more appealing. Living alone, in a messy apartment (that perfectly outlined her messy life), hosting gatherings of seemingly unrelated people, projected the ideal of freedom — the sense of a modern woman that embodies the ideals of a life lived from the other side of social rules.

Instead of looking back at the woman, what appeals to me is the attractiveness of the story around her that turned her image into a classic. And why does it feel so timeless? Because it resonates.

Not only do my quiet mornings begin with (in my case) a black cat jumping on my bed, as much as the beauty of the dependence we have on just one another. Which is, in other words, a way to describe the beauty of being a young woman, independent, living in the city I chose, alone in the space I have just for me (and my cat).

Holding it all together, the morning is what makes the life of a Solo Dweller Bohemian Holly-alike. A few instants before the blue hour, I am woken up by Amore (yes, my cat is really called Amore), asking for nothing but my attention. It’s still dark, Milan is still slumbering. After giving him proof of all my love, he, intrinsically, falls asleep, and I remain in that lonesomeness — the one that, more than any other moment, belongs to me and my thoughts. The one that, between other beautiful lines, has produced this newsletter—when I sit on my balcony, and write until the city wakes up. It’s almost surreal how, in those cracks of daybreak, the bond between me and my thoughts goes on. The words fill the paper almost naturally, producing both narratives and essays, as the topics seem closer to my own being, while the world is dreaming, as far as if we weren’t part of the same reality (which, perhaps, we aren’t?). The absence of one thing always brings another one closer. Which is why I love the transition periods of dim light, for they feel so intimate. At the end of it all, it is the most private sensation of all: the presence of your own impressions, and the dedication to write it all down before they slip away.

Solitaire? Maybe.

But that is where the urge for writing begins. As Marguerite Duras beautifully described in her book Écrire, loneliness is the starting point of every writer’s passion. What solitudine represents, in our world, is way less related to the feeling of missing something, to the lack of company or social interaction. I have always connected it more to the wish, almost a desire, to communicate our mind to the people I haven’t formally met yet. And, in order to do it, the author has to find herself in a certain aspect of “aloneness”: that allows her to hear and follow the thoughts, so that ideas fill the paper naturally. Almost as écriture automatique, the words that follow one another without editing can only be detected in the absence of others — and such absence shall, indeed, last long enough.

The idea from the book I found personally intriguing is the one of leaving in order to write. Marguerite goes to her house away from Paris, where, being completely alone, she can devote herself to her inner world. Resonates with other writers? Completely. With a small designer update: the beauty of the places we choose to go. Interiors matter more than we admit, and there are certain rooms, or places as well, that motivate our inspiration. It’s hardly that random an occurrence that most of my essays were written in the solitudine of my Viennese life, where I used to surround myself with the beauty of the hotels I lived in. The music of the past, the notes of Mozart, Haydn and Wagner definitely played a part in the topics I was developing there (as well as in my own self-improvement), turning me into the slightly distant, detached and introspective observer, looking for the smallest moments of inspiration and putting them into larger narratives.

When we decorate the room, we choose the background for our life, bringing together the segments of who we believe we are. Holly’s apartment was full of random objects, neither having its place, following the assembly of seemingly arbitrary people brought together. The charm is in effortlessness. The chic is in not thinking too much about the outcome, and letting the situation develop as it should — and the items find their place the same way.

One thing that interests me from the film (and its translation into personal reality) is the form of freedom no one talks about before entering this phase: the obsession with collecting beautiful objects. Although it is famously said that women living alone have the best (and largest) wardrobes, the joy of finding items closely dedicated to intellectual value has its own space in day-to-day existence. Taking, for example, books. The feeling of possessing the collection on the shelves of my living room, having the liberty to return to them whenever I need to recollect a segment from them, is precious. The same is true with little mirrors, vintage brushes (with initials, certainly), old ashtrays (although being a lifelong non-smoker, somehow they always look so nice), or hairpins (that unfortunately can hardly be put to use on my French bob). Yet, the presence of such well-curated objects holds the secret of this kind of freedom: devotion to the compilation, rather than mere function. Quite possibly, this is why my Saturday mornings, instead of having breakfast in front of Tiffany’s store before going to bed, start with visiting the library as the exemplification of the surrealist objective chance and seeing which title I’ll fall in love with that day. As it happens, my admiration towards Japanese culture brought a slight touch of tsundoku to this routine, but still, as with the first morning coffee, the sense is in the small enjoyment of the process (or situation) itself.

There is a peculiar kind of closeness in inhabiting a place entirely according to your own rhythm. Nothing asks to be negotiated; silence is no longer an absence, but a material from which the day is built. The only interruption comes from Amore, who, with the confidence only cats possess, seems convinced that every room ultimately belongs to him. Somehow, the apartment never feels empty because of it. We move around one another with an understanding that requires no words, each returning to our own occupations: he to whichever patch of sunlight he has declared worthy that morning, I to whichever thought has decided to keep me company that day.

| Written in the dawn of Milanese summer. Love,

Greta

Thank you for reading! For further developed thoughts, please follow Soft Echoes, and my Instagram 🖤

In the tranquility of the seaside, my soul used to become restless—aching for the wild and the unknown places, or the individuals who breathe there. There was always something cinematic about those quiet hours by the shore—the way salt clung to the skin, how pages turned slower under the weight of the heat, and how reality seemed to loosen just enough to allow imagined presences to slip through. Yet, it wasn’t a mere escape. I used to daydream of people I had not met yet, of their ambitions and emotions, and of the possibility of us connecting within the pause between fragments of our intellectual conversations.

In the seconds of belonging to none but myself, I used to read about intense love—the kind that is found only in books and songs, yet makes our hearts long for something never experienced. The severity described in the meetings of English romanticism, the tormented sincerity, and also the still, yet vigorous silences in André Aciman’s narratives.

Rereading them, I couldn’t help but fantasize—not only about the adventures themselves, but about what kind of personalities we would have needed to awaken within us in order to live the amour fou without losing ourselves inside it.

If anticipation and fulfilment are rarely the same thing, literature offers a curious third possibility. For a few hundred pages, we are allowed to inhabit emotions without needing to possess them, to accompany people whose lives briefly become more vivid than our own, and to return changed without quite knowing why.

These are the books I find myself reaching for every summer:

Find Me — André Aciman

Dramatic love stories are replaced by conversations that unexpectedly become turning points. Train journeys that alter a future, or encounters that arrive decades later.

Set years after Call Me by Your Name, Find Me follows four interconnected lives moving between Italy, Paris and New York. Rather than returning to the intensity of first love, Aciman turns his attention to what happens afterwards: how desire changes with age, how certain encounters arrive unexpectedly, and how memory continues to shape the present without imprisoning it. His prose remains unmistakably his own—patient, intimate and attentive to everything that is left unsaid. It is perhaps one of the gentlest novels ever written about second chances.

Nadja — André Breton

A surrealist story. Follows his encounter with a mysterious young woman in Paris, the narrative is moving through streets, cafés and sudden signs as if the city itself were conspiring around them. Nadja appears less like a conventional character than an apparition: lucid, unstable, magnetic, impossible to fully possess through explanation. The book is built on that trembling line between real encounter and dream, where beauty becomes convulsive precisely because it cannot be made rational.

Bonjour Tristesse — Françoise Sagan

Almost nothing happens, yet everything changes. A summer on the Côte d’Azur unfolds through sunlit breakfasts, afternoons by the sea and evenings that appear wonderfully carefree until they no longer are. Sagan observes how elegance can coexist with emotional carelessness, and how a single decision, made almost playfully, can quietly become irreversible.

Dream Story — Arthur Schnitzler

Vienna has rarely felt more beautiful—or more unsettling. A married couple exchange seemingly harmless confessions, and the following night unfolds like a sequence of half-remembered dreams populated by masked strangers, hidden desires and unanswered questions. Schnitzler never tells us exactly where fantasy ends and reality begins, leaving the reader to discover that the distinction may not matter as much as we think.

The novella later inspired Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, though its dreamlike atmosphere belongs unmistakably to fin-de-siècle Vienna. Set in the depths of winter, it nevertheless carries the suspended quality I associate with summer reading: the feeling that ordinary life has quietly loosened its grip, allowing the subconscious to emerge.

South of the Border, West of the Sun — Haruki Murakami

Most Murakami novels invite us into worlds where the impossible feels strangely ordinary. This one does the opposite. Everything remains plausible, almost painfully so. A successful man unexpectedly reunites with the girl he once knew as a child, and the encounter begins to unsettle not only his present but his understanding of the life he has built. Few novels capture so delicately the strange persistence of people who, despite years of absence, never entirely leave us.

Just Kids — Patti Smith

There is something deeply reassuring about reading the early years of people who would later become cultural icons. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe spend much of this memoir worrying about rent, searching for work, making art with whatever they can afford and believing—sometimes against all evidence—that their lives are moving somewhere meaningful. The result is less a memoir of fame than a reminder that every artistic life begins long before anyone is watching. The devotion feels inspiring becasue it is, to start with, real.

The Poetics of Space — Gaston Bachelard

Some books change what we think. This one changes what we notice. After reading Bachelard, attics, windows, staircases, corners and old wardrobes stop being background details and begin to reveal themselves as places where memory quietly settles. It is one of those rare books that continues long after the final page because it permanently alters the way ordinary spaces are experienced.

A Room with a View — E. M. Forster

The room with the view is, in many ways, only an excuse. What Lucy Honeychurch truly discovers in Florence is another version of herself—one that feels increasingly difficult to leave behind once she returns to England. Forster writes with remarkable lightness, allowing architecture, landscape and conversation to become subtle forces capable of changing the direction of a life.

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It accompanies us with such regularity that we almost stop noticing it. It is the first surface we consult in the morning and often the last before going to sleep. We pause before it while leaving the house, before entering a meeting, after washing our hands in a restaurant, sometimes even while passing a shop window. Individually these moments seem insignificant. Together, they amount to years spent looking at our own reflection.

What I find remarkable is that we have never actually seen ourselves. Everything we know about our appearance has reached us indirectly—through polished glass, photographs and the reactions of other people. The image we carry of ourselves is, in every sense, constructed.

Perhaps this explains why reflective surfaces occupy such an unusual place among everyday possessions.

Most things in a room ask to be used. This one asks us to stop.

We spend much of our lives arranging the version of ourselves that will be seen by others. We choose clothes, gestures, expressions and words. We decide what deserves attention and what is better left unnoticed. In that sense, identity is always, at least partly, an editorial exercise.

Standing before the glass interrupts that process.

For a few seconds there is nothing to negotiate. It neither improves nor diminishes what it receives. It simply presents us as we happen to be in that particular moment: more tired than we had imagined, calmer than we expected, perhaps older than we remembered, or unexpectedly confident.

Then we walk away.

The reflection disappears immediately, while the surface itself remains completely unchanged. We return later and the same exchange begins again, as though the previous one had never taken place.

I have often wondered whether this repeated encounter is precisely why mirrors were so rarely left without ornament.

When Siegfried Bing opened Maison de l’Art Nouveau in Paris, he proposed something rather radical for his time. Art should not remain confined to galleries or the homes of collectors; it should accompany ordinary life. Beauty deserved to inhabit lamps, furniture, combs, perfume bottles, ceramics and every domestic possession touched repeatedly throughout the day.

Few things embodied that ambition more naturally than a mirror.

Art Nouveau answered by refusing to treat the frame as a simple border.

Instead, it became an extension of nature itself.

Walnut softened into climbing ivy. Bronze unfolded into iris blossoms, lilies and ginkgo leaves. Dragonflies settled on the upper corners with wings so finely worked that they appeared almost weightless. Long, uninterrupted curves replaced rigid geometry, allowing the carved wood to feel less constructed than grown.

Looking at these pieces today, one quickly realises that the reflection was only half of the experience. The craftsmanship surrounding it was equally worthy of contemplation.

Even the different forms these furnishings assumed seem to correspond to different rituals.

The cheval mirror possesses an almost architectural presence. Standing independently on carved supports, it accompanies departures. We instinctively step backwards until the whole figure enters the composition, checking not only what we are wearing but how we occupy space. It is less concerned with details than with presence.

The hand mirror invites an entirely different gesture. It asks to be lifted, turned towards the light and brought close. Instead of confronting our appearance all at once, it encourages attention to fragments: the line of an eyebrow, the shape of an ear, the way a curl refuses to settle. Art Nouveau designers often devoted as much imagination to the handle as to the reflective plate itself, transforming it into a small sculpture of twisting vines, flowers or elongated female figures.

The dressing-table mirror belongs to perhaps the most private ritual of all. It rarely stands in isolation. Crystal perfume bottles, silver-backed brushes, jewellery cases, letters tucked beneath their corners, a watch removed before sleep, yesterday’s lipstick left uncapped for a moment too long—all gather around it naturally. It becomes less a furnishing than the quiet centre of a daily ceremony.

Perhaps this explains why vintage examples continue to exert such fascination; because they belong to a moment when usefulness alone was considered insufficient. Even the most familiar routines deserved beauty.

Older mirrors carry another fascination that is more difficult to explain.

Unlike a cabinet or a chair, they have spent decades facing people.

Morning after morning they have received faces that no longer exist in quite the same way. They have watched someone practise a smile before leaving for an interview, hesitate before cutting their own fringe, wonder whether a new pair of glasses suited them, return home after a celebration still wearing yesterday’s make-up, or notice, almost accidentally, the first grey hair.

None of these moments was historically significant.

Most were probably forgotten by the people who lived them.

Yet the reflective surface was present for every one of them.

Of course, we know that glass keeps no memory. Each image disappears the instant its owner steps away.

And yet I find it strangely difficult to stand before a mirror that has survived a century without imagining the quiet succession of lives that have unfolded in front of it. Not because I believe it preserves those reflections, but because it reminds me how briefly each one remains.

Perhaps that is what distinguishes a vintage mirror from a contemporary one.

Both return our own image with equal fidelity.

Only one makes us aware that we are part of a much longer sequence of people who have paused, looked, adjusted themselves almost absent-mindedly, and then continued with their lives.

The reflection changes.

The frame endures.

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For longer, thought-provoking essays, follow my publication, Soft Echoes

A year filled with novelty, discovery, places, faces, conversations, and emotions becomes enormous in memory. A year of repetition becomes tiny. The paradox is that when we’re living novelty, time seems fast because we’re absorbed; yet later it occupies immense space in our recollections. Routine often feels slow while we’re inside it but vanishes almost entirely afterward. That is why childhood feels long in retrospect: not because it lasted longer, but because everything was being encountered for the first time.

As the ultimate writer about this topic, Marcel Proust developed an image of time as highly subjective, elastic, and preserved within us. In his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, he describes: “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase filled with perfumes, with sounds, with projects, with climates.” For him, time was never something measured by clocks. It was something accumulated inside experience itself. The true length of a moment depended not on its duration but on its density; on how many sensations, emotions, associations, and impressions it contained. This is why a simple taste of a madeleine is capable of unfolding entire worlds buried beneath consciousness. The past, in Proust’s vision, is never truly gone. It survives in fragments, waiting for a sound, a scent, a gesture, or a texture to awaken it. Time, therefore, is less a straight line than a hidden archive carried within us, one that expands and contracts according to what memory chooses to preserve.

There is no aspect of time that can be looked at aside from memory. The present moment, in the second we name it, has already passed into the past - inside our recollection. Our very perception of its duration is based precisely on that, on the number of small accents that keep shining in the hall of reminiscences of our mind.

As the art form that describes life in the closest sense, cinema has captured this abstract subject in a particularly romantic way. Andrei Tarkovsky referred to this kind of art as “sculpting in time.” Cinematography has the capacity to make a certain memory eternal. Just like sculptures remain unchanged by years, a thought or a past event, once visualised on screen, becomes easily accessible forever. We can always revisit it, not as active participants, but as observers who can sense the details as vividly as they did upon the first recollection.

Retention, in this way, becomes preserved, and we can always revisit it to relive it. Taking it less as a nostalgic attempt to revisit the past (or, worse, overthink it), every time we take a closer look at something that marked us once before, we experience it in a new way. As the Proustian formulation, “We remember not the thing itself; we remember the last time we remembered it,” suggests, there is a kind of novelty in the past, too.

Similar to the experience of returning to the same city over and over again, the streets, although visually unchanged, are lived in a completely different way. For, together with the changes that happen within us, the very understanding and experience of our surroundings change as well.

Yet perhaps there is another consequence hidden inside this relationship between memory and time.

We often think of memory as something directed backwards, a place we visit out of nostalgia, curiosity, or sentimentality. But memory may be just as important for the future as it is for the past. It provides us with a source of references that belong entirely to us.

Contemporary life encourages the opposite movement. Before visiting a city, we search for guides. Before reading a book, we look for recommendations. Before choosing a restaurant, an exhibition, a hotel, or even a route through a neighbourhood, we consult lists assembled by strangers. As a result, many of us arrive at the same places, photograph the same corners, and leave with remarkably similar impressions. The experience itself becomes increasingly shared before it has even happened.

When we begin treating our own experiences as future material, the world changes slightly. A walk taken without destination, a conversation that seemed insignificant at the time, a forgotten street encountered by accident, an afternoon spent in a place that never appeared on anyone’s list — all of these become deposits within memory. They accumulate quietly, without announcing their future importance.

Years later, they often return unexpectedly.

A particular light reflected on a building may suggest an idea for a project, showing that the memories themselves are not valuable because they are extraordinary, but because they are ours.

This is perhaps why revisiting the past can sometimes feel surprisingly creative. We do not return to recover what has been lost, but to discover what remained unnoticed. Every return reveals something different because the person returning is different as well. The city we revisit is not the same city, we look it through different eyes, as we have become different persons.

The madeleine does not simply recover the past; it transforms it into something newly visible. What emerges is not a perfect reproduction of what once happened, but a fresh encounter between a present self and a preserved fragment of experience.

Novelty does not always require travelling further, consuming more, or finding the next undiscovered thing. Sometimes it begins by paying closer attention to what has already happened to us.

And the more attentively we inhabit our days, the richer that archive becomes. Every unfamiliar street, every unexpected conversation, every detour taken without purpose adds another layer to it. In this sense, seeking novelty is not only a way of making life feel fuller while we are living it. It is also a way of creating future sources of meaning, inspiration, and recognition.

We experience time through memory, that, in turn, shapes how we experience the future. The moments that stay with us become the references through which we understand what comes next, which might be why a well-lived life feels so expansive in retrospect. Not because more time has passed, but because more of it remains alive.

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As it usually comes, my observation went through personal archive (or memory) to the very early age of Instagram. In Vienna some 10 years ago, I was looking at the profiles of people such as Olja Ryzevski, admiring her aesthetical profile, and, even more, the consistency of noticing beauty around her, capturing such, and posting it. Being a visual designer myself, I found a resonance in such grids, admiring someone else’s taste.

Nevertheless, the given example of consistent showing up digitally was only one in the million. Social media made us believe that posting was the new form of high agency — so people, driven by the desire to be influental and successful, started using it for all sort of niche. Including the private life.

And perhaps this is precisely what has changed online since then.

The early years of social media operated largely through aspiration. One followed people because their lives appeared desirable, aesthetically resolved, emotionally coherent in ways one’s own life perhaps did not yet feel. The mechanism depended on projection. “I want to become her” was often the silent structure underneath digital admiration. But the internet eventually became too visible for projection to function in the same way. Once aspiration turned into mass production, the emotional effect weakened. Beautiful apartments, morning routines, expensive skincare, curated relationships, airport diaries, softly lit dinners — all of it became infinitely reproducible. The image did not disappear. It became repetitive.

And slowly, another form of attachment began replacing aspiration altogether.

The creators who increasingly remained memorable were often no longer the ones presenting the most desirable lives, but the ones capable of articulating something others already felt privately without ever having fully named it themselves.

The structure shifted from projection to recognition.

The old internet quietly said: “I want to become her.”

The current one increasingly says: “She articulated something I already felt.”

The closer people appeared to us, the stronger the attachment supposedly became. Entire careers emerged from the careful exposure of ordinary life: apartment corners arranged into soft evidence of taste, morning routines filmed in expensive light, relationships transformed into episodic narratives followed by millions of strangers. The distinction between private life and public image gradually dissolved until personality itself became a form of media production.

For years, this system functioned almost flawlessly because it relied on something psychologically ancient: projection.

Influencing, at its peak, depended almost entirely on this gap between the viewer and the image. The distance itself produced desire. One imagined that proximity to the object might also produce proximity to the emotional condition surrounding it. But eventually the internet reached a point of oversaturation where aspiration itself started collapsing under repetition. Not because creators suddenly lost aesthetic intelligence, but because the structure became too visible. Once millions of people began performing desirability simultaneously, the emotional mechanics behind such stopped feeling convincing. Morning routines started resembling one another with almost algorithmic precision. Apartments, relationships, travel diaries, self-care rituals — everything became aesthetically differentiated yet psychologically identical.

The coat remained a coat. The hotel remained a hotel. The serum remained a serum. Consumption continued, but increasingly without illusion. The fantasy weakened once audiences understood how heavily the image depended on framing, editing, continuity, lighting, emotional suggestion, and narrative sequencing. Exposure, after a certain threshold, stopped intensifying desire and started interrupting it.

This is partly why the centre of gravity online began shifting away from lifestyle itself and toward perception. The creators who increasingly remained memorable were often not the ones displaying the most enviable existence, but the ones capable of articulating a thought others already carried vaguely within themselves without having fully named it. Instead of presenting a desirable life, they offered a distinct way of seeing. And strangely, that created a far stronger form of attachment than visibility ever did.

A precise observation now often creates more memorability than months of intimate access. Not because people suddenly became intellectual, but because the digital environment became emotionally exhausted by endless performance. Once everybody began selling versions of perfection, the only thing that still felt alive was perception itself.

This also changed the structure of public image.

For years, visibility online depended on transforming private life into consumable material. Now public image increasingly functions through mind rather than exposure. What circulates most intensely is no longer necessarily someone’s breakfast, relationship, apartment, or routine, but their sensibility: their references, their interpretation of culture, their visual intelligence, their ability to articulate a tension before it becomes fully visible socially.

In many ways, we stopped showing our lives and started showing our thinking. What people increasingly search for online now is not unrestricted access to another person’s existence, but traces of interiority. Someone capable of producing recognition rather than projection. Someone whose perception reorganises a feeling already present but not yet fully articulated. Someone articulating what we’ve been thinking about, but never put into wording well enough.

And perhaps this is also why the distinction between person and brand has started becoming visible again.

A brand survives through consistency. A person does not.

A brand requires recognisability, repetition, coherence of message. Human beings, on the other hand, are contradictory structures. They disappear unexpectedly, lose certainty, become quiet for months, reverse opinions, feel detached from identities they previously performed convincingly. A person contains moods, ambivalence, interruptions, unresolved tensions. Branding simplifies. Living complicates.

The problem is that social media historically rewarded branding far more effectively than humanity. Contradiction performs poorly online. Ambivalence performs poorly. Silence performs poorly. The unresolved parts of being human rarely translate efficiently into content architecture.

And yet those unresolved parts are often precisely what make somebody feel real. Perfectly exposed lives no longer produce the fascination they once did, especially because endless visibility eventually exhausted the fantasy attached to them.

What disappeared was not desire. Only the belief that fulfilment could still be found inside the performance of a perfectly visible life.

Love,

Greta

Baudelaire called him the flâneur. The urban wanderer. The detached observer who moves through cities not as a tourist with a destination, but as someone following an interior pull he couldn’t quite name. Among the most famous — Gustave Caillebotte, Virginia Woolf, Giacomo Leopardi — what they shared wasn’t a love of travel in the modern sense. It was a restlessness that only movement could temporarily satisfy. A search not for places, but for feelings those places unlocked.

We live in an era that has made travel ordinary. Easy flights, aspirational Instagram grids, the two-week escape packaged as personality. And yet this has only sharpened the distinction between the tourist and the flâneur — because the tourist is looking for paradise, for the dream version of elsewhere, for a break from life. The flâneur is looking for something he can’t get at home. Which is a different thing entirely.

What draws him is almost always the past made present. Vienna, Florence, Rome, Paris — cities where history doesn’t feel archived but alive, where walking down an alley produces the uncanny sensation of continuity, of all the people who walked the same stones before, carrying their own preoccupations, their own loves, their own unfinished thoughts.

Baudelaire described it precisely:

There is a particular freedom in being unknown in a city. The version of you that exists there has no history, no obligations, no accumulated identity. It is the self before other people’s perceptions solidified it. Which is, perhaps, why certain cities feel less like destinations and more like permissions.

Anaïs Nin wrote that she had no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. This, I think, is the truest description of what drives the wanderer — not adventure in the cinematic sense, but the terror of a life unlived at its full depth. Lord Byron understood this. His years in Greece didn’t merely inspire his poetry — they expanded the very capacity of who he was. Some selves can only be found by leaving the place that formed you.

— turns out to have a quieter answer than the restlessness suggests. Not a place. Not even an experience, exactly. But the particular version of himself that a certain light, a certain rhythm, a certain city makes possible. The flâneur doesn’t wander because he is lost. He wanders because he has understood something most people spend a lifetime avoiding — that we are not one self, but many, and that some of those selves can only be found by leaving.

Complete observation is on Soft Echoes: The City We Become

Love,

Greta

Seven days, as an amount of time of their own, are enough for many things to happen. Yet, within the proximity of so many people circulating around, and among small encounters that might turn either into significant collaborations or trivial nothing at all, what draws my attention most is the attitude that remains with visitors long after the week is over. And, as somehow usually happens, the main topic of discussion becomes the one least expected.

We are in the middle of the digital age. Fast execution, and even faster consumption of content, have made the creative process much easier, by shifting the importance from polishing the product toward the idea itself. Fascination with algorithmic “help” is everywhere in the advertising, fashion, and design fields, with AI-generated narratives becoming almost expected. Perfection, which for a long time was both popular and desirable, now seems easy to reach for — making it less impressive.

Maison Dior, collaborating with designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, took visitors into a soft fairyland made of roses, butterflies, and golden leaves. Palazzo Landriani became the living memory of Villa Les Rhumbs in Granville, the childhood paradise of Christian Dior.

Gucci’s archive “went for a walk” in Chiostri di San Simpliciano, where an exhibition celebrating 150 years of the house took the form of a Renaissance painting, honoring Italian craft. The photographs were printed on canvas in the cortile of the floral garden — the emblematic Gucci Flora motif, designed by Vittorio Accornero de Testa in 1966.

Because memory, in luxury, is often stronger than novelty. What remains is rarely the object itself, but the feeling attached to it: the room, the scent, the light, the person we were while looking at it.

Prada and Miu Miu, instead, hosted cultural gatherings, following the idea of experience as the most memorable event. Time that allows the visitor to actively participate, making them an actor within the discussion, stays with them long after.

Titled In Sight, this edition explores image production as a central element of contemporary culture, where representation often prevails over facts. Considering the image as a cultural, political, and material force, the symposium investigates the tensions between the real and the represented, while the boundaries between human-made and machine-generated images become increasingly blurred. Through lectures and conversations, the program reflects on visual cultures, the environmental and social costs of digital images, the political use of images, and the economies of attention that determine their circulation.

Miu Miu’s Literary Club had a similar creative intention: bringing writers and readers together, allowing the unique joy of communication. In this new chapter, the conversations address the political nature of desire — not only as a private impulse or emotional tension, but as a force that shapes the right to self-determination. When desire breaks the schemes imposed by society, it stops being an intimate matter and becomes an act of resistance.

As a bridge between these two modern “analog” approaches comes the collaboration between Arket and Laila Gohar.

A secret garden, as a pause from rushing Milan, with a vintage carousel in the middle and classical music playing in the background. The idea follows the magic of old times, and the nostalgic interpretation of it through an artistic mind. By replacing the horses with vegetables, the beauty of the moment is celebrated, with a soft interpretation of the past — both in a personal and historical sense.

Perhaps this is why the most successful spaces this year were not the loudest ones, but the ones that allowed silence. Places where beauty was not announced, but discovered. Rooms that asked you to stay a little longer, and in doing so, made themselves unforgettable.

In the end, what Salone leaves behind goes beyond objects, or installations, to a reminder that in an age obsessed with speed, what stays with us is still slowness. Craft. Presence. A conversation remembered days later. A garden hidden behind a gate. The feeling of having briefly entered a world that seemed to exist outside of time.

Love,

Greta

You have probably felt it. The way a certain month of a certain year seems to glow differently in memory than it did while you were living it. At the time it looked normal, almost casual. With distance, you edited it, added interpretation, and somewhere in that process it became rare. Extraordinary. Something you didn’t know you were living until it was already gone.

When the mind becomes too busy looking back, it develops an obsession — not simply to remember, but to understand. To find the missing piece that would finally explain why things went the way they did. Yet the more it repeats the sequence, the further the conclusion moves. L.P. Hartley described it precisely: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” You can visit, but you will never fully speak the language.

This is exactly the territory that L’Appartement (1996, Gilles Mimouni) inhabits. A man slips away from his structured, stable life to pursue an old love — convinced that by returning to the place of a past episode, he can finally understand it. What he finds instead is that the situation he believed was between two people had many more actors, whose desires were quietly woven into his own without his knowledge.

Wong Kar-wai goes somewhere different with 2046. His writer doesn’t search for explanations — he searches for a feeling. He builds an imaginary world where the moment stays the same forever, and looks for her in every new woman he meets. Marcel Proust understood this precisely: “To be with the people one loves, to speak to them, not to speak to them, it is all the same.” What is lost is not the person. It is the atmospheric, almost wordless quality of being near them. And that, unlike an explanation, cannot be found anywhere else.

The cruelty of the film is in its opening — the writer is the only one who ever came back from 2046. He went looking for her and she wasn’t there.

What felt like a once-in-a-lifetime connection may have been, on the other side, a passing encounter. This doesn’t make it less real, but rather lonelier.

We live in a culture that has made this loneliness structurally easier to avoid. The speed of consumption — of experiences, connections, stimuli — kept us safe from the pullback. Every missed opportunity could theoretically reappear. Every miscalculation could be corrected. By constantly moving forward, one never had to sit with the consequence of having moved on too quickly in the first place. It felt like freedom. It was also, quietly, a way of never having to grieve anything.

Now the rhythm is slowing. And with slowness, the echoes return. What the culture of fast consumption created without realising it is its own version of 2046 — not in the past, but projected forward. A place where possibilities live instead of memories. Where there will be others and another chance will come replace the harder work of acknowledging what was actually lost. It is, in its own way, equally delusional. And equally lonely.

Cinema understood all of this long before we did. Its power has always been precisely this — to hold the feeling-tone of experiences we haven’t processed, and show them back to us from a safe enough distance that we can finally look. From that buffer zone, something becomes possible that isn’t possible in real life: you can watch the final scene, recognise your own chapter in it, and then accept that no amount of nostalgia can relive what is gone.

This is what I think we are collectively reaching for right now. Not resolution exactly. Not closure, which has always been a slightly false promise. But the quiet acknowledgment that some things were real, and mattered, and are over. That the past is a foreign country and we were, briefly, allowed to visit. That Mr. Chow’s search for her in every woman he met was not weakness — it was the most human thing in the film.

We carry what we carry. Cinema just gives us somewhere to put it down for two hours, so we can remember what it feels like to breathe without it.

Love, Greta

This was, at least, the founding conviction of Art Nouveau. In the winter of 1895, Siegfried Bing opened a gallery on the Rue de Provence in Paris and called it Maison de l’Art Nouveau. Inside, entire rooms had been designed as total environments, such as Tiffany glass, Morris fabrics, ceramics, jewelry, furniture, all held together by a single conviction: that beauty was not a privilege of painting, not a quality reserved for objects behind velvet ropes, but something that could and should inhabit everything a person touched. The movement took its name from the shop, applying the aim of making everyday life full of delightful forms.

It is not a coincidence that one of the most radical aesthetic ideas of the nineteenth century was named after a place where you could buy things. This series is about objects that understand that.

Historically charming, small in scale, yet powerful in its effect, its content gives a certain chicness to the person choosing it. Looking at those from earlier times, what we popularly call vintage, they feel like small objects from a quieter, more deliberate world, a time when fragrance was treated as something intimate and lasting, rather than seasonal or disposable. They were designed not just to hold fragrance, but to remain on a dressing table for years, slowly becoming part of someone’s life.

When we imagine them, what we often visualize are Romantic cut-glass and boudoir bottles from the early 1900s to the 1930s, whose shapes were rounded and feminine, often engraved with delicate floral patterns, and sometimes topped with silver lids or atomizer bulbs. These bottles feel personal and private, as if they belonged to a woman who dressed slowly in the morning light, surrounded by lace curtains and handwritten letters, using them in everyday rituals.

Later, during the Art Deco period, bottles were defined by their architectural elegance. They were typically crafted from heavy crystal or thick glass, with geometric lines, faceted stoppers, and minimal decoration. Mid-century designs, often made in colored glass or unusual shapes, produced small collectible objects that accumulated over time.

As happens countless times, certain fragrances remind us immediately of someone. Within our own rituals, perfume holds a significant place in both daily and evening routines.

Looking at the stories they carry, one personal preference falls on the year 1977 — New York Harbor, one of the most controversial moments in fashion and fragrance history: Yves Saint Laurent’s launch of the provocative Opium. The perfume referenced addiction, forbidden pleasure, and altered states — themes rarely associated openly with luxury at the time. While today this might seem almost tame, in the late 1970s it was shocking, especially for a major couture house.

Critics accused the brand of romanticizing drugs and exploiting references to opium, particularly given the historical trauma associated with the opium trade in Asia. Protests erupted, especially in the United States and parts of Asia, where some groups demanded the perfume be withdrawn. But the controversy only amplified its aura.

The bottle design, created by Pierre Dinand, reinforced this sense of desire and addiction. It was inspired by a Japanese inrō — a small lacquered container used to carry precious objects. The deep red lacquer, gold accents, and tassel made the bottle feel mysterious and sensual, like an object from another world.

The fragrance itself matched the story. Opium was heavy, warm, and intoxicating, full of spices, amber, resins, and florals. It did not aim to be fresh or discreet. It was bold, enveloping, and unmistakable. At a time when many perfumes were becoming lighter, Opium embraced excess and sensuality.

And, as expected, the following are a few of my favourites:

Frédéric Malle — Portrait of a Lady

Created in 2010 by perfumer Dominique Ropion for Frédéric Malle, it quickly became one of the most respected modern fragrances, almost instantly classic. At its heart is rose, but, instead of a delicate or youthful note, this is a deep, dark, intellectual rose, layered with patchouli, incense, spices, and warm woods. The result is rich, enveloping, sensual and slightly mysterious. The name itself is inspired by Henry James’ novel The Portrait of a Lady, and the perfume reflects that literary sensibility.

Annick Goutal — Rose Pompon

Rose Pompon by Annick Goutal is a very different interpretation of rose: lighter, brighter, and more playful, yet still refined. The fragrance combines rose with subtle fruity and musky notes, creating something airy and modern without losing elegance. Where Portrait of a Lady feels like evening, Rose Pompon feels like morning. The bottle itself reflects this softness: the ribbed glass, the delicate ribbon, the classic shape. Annick Goutal bottles always feel slightly nostalgic, as if they belong to a Parisian dressing table from another era.

Diptyque — Eau Duelle

The Diptyque vanilla. Unlike traditional vanilla perfumes, which are often sweet and gourmand, Eau Duelle pairs it with spices, woods, and a slightly smoky undertone, creating something subtle and atmospheric. The vanilla here is not dessert-like — it feels more like warm wood, old paper, or a quiet interior. Diptyque described it as inspired by travel along the spice routes, and the fragrance reflects that idea of vanilla as something exotic yet restrained, warm yet quiet.

Hermès — Un Jardin sur le Nil

Un Jardin sur le Nil by Hermès was created in 2005 by perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, it belongs to the Hermès Jardin series of fragrances imagined as places. This one was inspired by gardens along the Nile in Egypt. But rather than exotic intensity, Ellena chose restraint and freshness. The perfume opens with green mango, citrus, and soft vegetal notes — something airy, luminous, and slightly watery. There is also lotus, incense, and light woods, creating a feeling of warmth without heaviness. The fragrance feels almost like a memory of travel rather than travel itself. Jean-Claude Ellena often described perfume as something close to watercolor (rather than oil painting), and Un Jardin sur le Nil reflects this perfectly. It is transparent, subtle, and layered in a quiet way.

Byredo — Gypsy Water

Gypsy Water by Byredo is built around the idea of movement — travel, memory, and a certain intellectual freedom. It is inspired by a romanticized vision of nomadic life, but interpreted in a very restrained, Scandinavian way. The fragrance opens with bergamot and juniper berries, creating something fresh yet slightly dry. It then develops into incense, pine needles, and sandalwood, before settling into vanilla and soft amber. The result is warm, airy, and understated.

Love,

Greta

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Once the feed became too general, with the possibility of every kind of content getting noticed on it, users developed a kind of selectivity that requires not only the attentional choosing of what they wish to see, but also an interest towards authors, rather than creators. Following a person because of specific knowledge and taste has turned the general consumption of social media towards a more specific one: the subscription to the newsletter.

The private feed is especially intriguing for its ability to hold a specific audience gathered around a specific niche or interest. While the author is responsible for providing new insights, the mutual communication holds the desire for participation. Someone’s mind, considered to be interesting, has in this way created a specific stage for their thoughts alone.

Which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about for a while now — and I suspect you have too, otherwise you wouldn’t be here, reading this, instead of scrolling somewhere else.

We are living through what could be called the return of the author. Roland Barthes famously declared the death of the author in 1967, arguing that once a text is released into the world, the writer’s intentions become irrelevant — the reader takes over, creates meaning, owns interpretation. For decades, that idea felt like liberation. The internet seemed to prove him right: content was everywhere, authorless, endlessly remixed, the creator almost incidental to the content itself. The algorithm didn’t care who made something. It only cared whether you stopped scrolling.

But something has quietly reversed. The reader, exhausted, overstimulated, a little cynical, has started caring very much about who is speaking. Not the brand, not the account, not the content category. The person. The specific intelligence behind the words. Substack, in this sense, isn’t just a publishing platform. It is an infrastructure built entirely around the reassertion of authorship. You don’t subscribe to a topic. You subscribe to a mind.

You are opting out of curation-by-machine and opting into curation-by-human, specifically, one human whose sensibility you’ve decided aligns with something you want more of. It is, in its own way, an intimate act. More intimate than a follow, certainly more than a like.

What the newsletter offers that the feed cannot is continuity. A feed is episodic — each post competes for attention independently, context collapses, yesterday’s content is already archaeology.

And perhaps that is the most interesting thing happening here. In an attention economy that spent years optimizing for scale, more reach, more impressions, wider and wider, something is moving in the opposite direction. Towards the smaller room. The known voice. The chosen interlocutor.

You didn’t end up here by accident. The algorithm didn’t push this to you. You looked for it, or someone whose taste you trust mentioned it, or you followed a thread of curiosity until it led somewhere specific. That is not discovery in the old sense. That is something closer to seeking.

And seeking, I’d argue, is a different quality of attention entirely.

Love, Greta

A line that explains, with a certain precision, both a mentality and a way of dressing, grounded in a quiet refusal of perfection. The instability of the weather retains a distant echo of London, which perhaps explains why a garment of British origin has found such a resonance here. The coat is put on, then opened again within minutes. Only the first button closed. The belt held, then released. Nothing settles, neither the temperature nor the intention to dress.

I have often wondered what it is that gives certain garments the ability to exist outside of the constant negotiation between chic and dressed with attention, that delicate and often exhausting dialogue through which one attempts, each day, to align the inner landscape with the outer form. With this blooming light and hesitant warmth, that dialogue becomes more evident, as it resists any definitive answer. It is the season of incompletion, and of leaving space for spontaneous development of the day, as well as of the look.

The season of motion seems to have a quiet inclination for the trench. There is something remarkably precise in the way it consents to movement, as though it had been imagined with the certainty that stillness would never belong to it. It draws in the air while one walks, parts almost imperceptibly at the turning of a corner, slides along the arm with a softness that feels suspended between intention and chance, and in doing so, dissolves any clear boundary between itself and what surrounds it. More than once I have thought how it appears to falter when deprived of movement, as if stillness were a subtle form of absence. Left to itself, it becomes nearly an idea, somehow unresolved. It is only when the day resumes its quiet unfolding, when thoughts regain their natural cadence, that it returns to itself, reclaiming that elusive balance of discretion and presence, of restraint and quiet allure.

In Rohmer, especially in L’amour l’après-midi, it appears during those walks where nothing decisive happens and yet everything is already being considered, the coat following the hesitation of the character rather than shaping it. In Conte d’été, it is moving to the goodbye scene. The clock that is counting minutes before train department pushes lovers into the rush – such that could not be dressed in any other garment. In Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Catherine Deneuve carries it with a clarity that never becomes emphasis, as though the coat were simply part of the atmosphere, absorbing colour and light without altering them. And with Audrey Hepburn, moving quickly through the city in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it keeps pace without ever preceding her, remaining just behind, almost delayed, as if allowing the moment to unfold before settling into it.

There is, perhaps, a distinctly Parisian understanding of this kind of presence, one that does not require resolution and does not seek to fix itself into an image. The trench remains because it accommodates a certain way of moving through time, one that accepts variation, yet allows for hesitation. It is remembered as a part of a sequence, a continuity that belongs as much to the city as to the person moving through it.

To develop this thesis, one must look back at the cultural trends of the 2010s (and, to understand them fully, even at those of the 2000s). The years were marked by the rise of people putting their private life on display. With the rise of social media, figures that represented what came to be understood as modern luxury gained a certain popularity through visibility itself, including the exposure of the private details of life, for which, needless to say, the public was hungry.

There is always a certain fascination in looking closely at a lifestyle one cannot participate in. The age of display made it possible to voyeuristically observe the lives whose reputation was that of being the perfect ones.

With access to previously inaccessible information, such as Gigi Hadid’s daily habits, or Kate Moss’ thoughts, the image of access itself was constructed, naturally, in service of broader marketing, and the world gradually moved from visibility toward discretion.

Society came to orbit around visible proofs of taste. Influence, by social definition meaning the power to have an important effect on someone was defined by the number of people following the consumption choices of an individual. Naturally, the impact, in such a context, was built around what was put on display, as the number of individuals oversharing their habits, style, and preferences continued to grow.

That logic, however, led to oversaturation, and from oversaturation came the next movement: the turn backward, toward the past — toward an age before such forms of communication could even exist. Nostalgia, as a popular term, reflects not only admiration of what came before, but also the very intention of having it relived.

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Schiaparelli’s fashion belonged to a world where clothing behaved like an idea rather than an object. One senses this immediately in her collaborations with the surrealist circle in Paris, especially with Salvador Dalí, whose influence allowed garments to operate as small philosophical provocations: dresses that appeared torn yet were meticulously constructed, hats that resembled shoes, lobster motifs placed exactly where the eye least expected them. These pieces carried a kind of mischievous intelligence, a refusal to remain obedient to the polite codes of elegance. Cinema, which thrives on illusion, welcomed that intelligence.

One of the most curious encounters between Schiaparelli and film emerged in the late 1930s, when Mae West commissioned costumes for the musical comedy Every Day’s a Holiday. The collaboration itself unfolded almost like a scene written by West: the actress could not travel to Paris for fittings, while Schiaparelli had no intention of crossing the Atlantic for Hollywood’s sake. Measurements were sent instead, and from those abstract numbers a dress was imagined into existence, one that reportedly played a role in inspiring the silhouette of Schiaparelli’s perfume bottle Shocking, whose curving shape echoed West’s famously generous proportions.

What fascinates here is not merely the garment but the entire chain of imagination that surrounds it: measurements translated into couture, couture translated into fragrance. Cinema becomes the quiet intermediary in this sequence of transformations.

If Schiaparelli’s presence in Every Day’s a Holiday was flamboyant, her relationship with film more broadly reveals a certain paradox. Hollywood adored her sensibility, the audacity of the hats, the exaggerated shoulders, the sudden flashes of shocking pink, yet cinema rarely allowed her imagination to unfold fully. Costume departments frequently softened her eccentricity, absorbing her designs into the more disciplined form of screen realism. Her work appeared, yet often as a diluted echo of the extraordinary world she built in Paris.

A later and more intriguing dialogue between Schiaparelli and cinema occurs in Moulin Rouge!, the Technicolor portrait of the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Although the film’s costumes were overseen by Marcel Vertès, Schiaparelli contributed designs that drew directly from Lautrec’s posters of Parisian cabaret life. The result was a curious temporal loop: Lautrec had once painted the dancers of the Moulin Rouge; decades later, Schiaparelli translated those drawings into garments for cinema, allowing painted bodies to return to life through fabric and movement.

Among the costumes worn by Zsa Zsa Gabor in the film, one encounters a silhouette that feels unmistakably Schiaparelli: a black sheath dress wrapped with a sequined serpent that coils upward across the torso, its head resting just beneath the collarbone. The gesture carries something unmistakably surrealist, as an ornament that feels almost animate, as though the dress itself possessed its own mischievous intelligence.

Watching the film today, one senses how easily Schiaparelli’s imagination converses with cinema’s appetite for spectacle. Lautrec’s dancers, Vertès’s illustrations, and Schiaparelli’s garments form a quiet triangle of artistic dialogue across decades.

The conversation continued much later, in a completely different register, with W.E., where costume designer Arianne Phillips recreated Schiaparelli gowns for the character of Wallis Simpson. The moment is brief yet revealing: the legendary lobster dress, originally photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in 1937, appears again on screen, carrying with it the faint echo of surrealist Paris, aristocratic scandal, and the theatricality that defined Simpson’s public persona.

What emerges across these cinematic appearances is a portrait of Schiaparelli as something slightly different from a conventional couturière. Her work enters the stage direction: the garments provoke glances and create the small disruptions that allow a character to exist more vividly within a frame.

In this sense, Schiaparelli understood something about cinema before cinema fully understood it about fashion: clothing possesses narrative potential. A hat, a snake embroidered across silk, a dress that appears torn open like a magician’s trick: these elements do not simply adorn the body. They introduce tension into the image, the subtle drama that keeps the viewer looking just a moment longer.

Some designers pursue elegance as a form of discipline. Schiaparelli pursued something else entirely: the pleasure of astonishment. And cinema, which exists precisely for those moments when reality briefly gives way to wonder, remains perhaps the most natural stage her imagination could ever inhabit.

“I’m looking for perfection in form. I do it with portraits, I do it with cocks, I do it with flowers.”

Few artists have described their work with such disarming precision as Robert Mapplethorpe. The statement appears almost blunt, yet it reveals the entire structure of his practice: the relentless search for an ideal form. Whether photographing bodies, faces, or flowers, Mapplethorpe returned obsessively to the same question: how close an image can come to perfection.

On January 29th, Milan’s Palazzo Reale opened the second act of the photographic retrospective ( the first presented at Venice’s Le Stanze della Fotografia and soon continuing in Rome) titled Le forme del desiderio. Hardly any other title could represent Mapplethorpe’s work more precisely. His motifs, faces, bodies, flowers, clearly reveal the artist’s desire to capture perfection. Yet beyond the obvious layer that names the retrospective lies another one. The title does not merely describe what is shown; it reveals the force that drives it.

Mapplethorpe is not only photographing desire; he exposes the mechanism that drives art itself. In his work, beauty becomes the visible manifestation of longing, what psychoanalysis would call jouissance.

The artistic process is fundamentally one of personal expression. But expression, if it is to sustain the act of creating over long periods of time, must be rooted deep within the artist’s being. Creation begins inward: in fear, trauma, beauty, and desire itself. Art therefore becomes instinctive. It is driven by the longing for a level of feeling that reality rarely allows us to reach. What is missing, what is felt as lost, becomes the object we pursue through artistic creation.

By choosing his subject, the artist leans toward capturing his own ache.

Unlike the familiar pleasure of plaisir, that is pleasant and stable, the impulse that motivates art is darker. Jouissance, conceptualized by Jacques Lacan as the desire for the unreachable, describes precisely this condition: a longing so intense that its fulfillment would be unbearable. It is not simple pleasure but an excess of it—an experience that borders on agony.

It is widely understood that the absence of the “lost object” creates the obsession with its return. Art becomes one of the ways through which that return is attempted.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography is characterized by his use of light to “sculpt” the photographed subject. Whether capturing portraits, as Patti Smith, Grace Jones, Isabella Rossellini, nudes, or flowers, his aim remains the same: the search for an absolute form.

What he captures is not merely erotic fascination, but the desire to witness a moment of perfection.

His images are built upon the comparison of beautiful forms. The same aesthetic attention given to the nude body, clearly charged with sexual energy, is applied to the fragility of a flower. Though these subjects appear opposite, they generate the same impact: desire.

Both are natural forms that fascinate through their near-divine construction.

The musculature of the human body, embodying strength, evokes admiration in a way that mirrors the instinct to protect something fragile. Natural forms are perfect precisely because they contain small imperfections. Their beauty belongs to what could be called the divine aspect of aesthetics, particularly because it challenges the viewer’s perception, asking us to recognize flaw and imperfection as part of desire itself. Perfection is the lost object.

Its meaning exceeds the simple theoretical category of the “beautiful.” What we typically call beautiful is something accessible. But what Mapplethorpe searches for lies beyond accessibility, yet it approaches the unreachable. Beauty begins to carry the same aura as the lost object itself, it unites flawlessness and ache in the most obvious way: the impulse to reach jouissance within a single image.

But is jouissance ever truly reachable? Or does its power lie precisely in the act of pursuing it?

Art offers the artist a particular safety within this dangerous pursuit. It allows him to observe his own yearnings from a distance. By capturing them, he remains both participant and witness: close enough to feel their intensity, yet distant enough to avoid their destructive consequences. It is within this tension that art emerges.

Mapplethorpe’s images are rigorous and sensual, perfect and unsettling. Male nudes resembling Greek sculptures coexist with intense portraits, enigmatic still lifes, and details that transform the everyday into something mysterious. The artist’s personal voyage, rooted deeply within the exploration of his sexuality, fuelled his obsession with form. The bodies and muscles, naturally associated with eroticism, here take on an almost sacred dimension. Their admiration extends beyond physical attraction toward something closer to the eternal structure of nature itself.

The same fascination appears in the photographs of flowers. Their fragility is sensual; their softness carries an erotic charge. Within them lies the same impulse: the desire both to possess and to protect.

For what we truly desire is always hidden beneath the obvious surface, residing in that deeper layer: where beauty, loss, and longing converge.

What is call beauty may simply be the form that longing takes when it becomes visible.

To understand the described connection, it is necessary to understand the cultural tendencies at the time when it was written. England, 1847. Romanticism was the dominant tendency in art and literature, and, as is well known, art follows life in the same way as life follows art. The idea of deep, devoted, almost destined love between two people existed alongside that of romantic liberation. The rise of individualism produced a tendency toward the inner experience of the world, and the fascination with sentiments led to a life led by the heart instead of the mind. Rational behaviour was considered superficial and old-fashioned, and people leaned toward embodying feeling more deeply and acting according to emotional compulsions. Poets William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron were putting sentiments, reason, and the gap in between into words. As described by Wordsworth himself, “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Literature became a way of explaining the deep inner life. The poems pointed to consuming someone fully, as well as longing for an intensity that seemed unreachable, almost imaginary, embodied in wanderlust. Sometimes it is the places that make us fall in love when we cannot find what we are looking for in emotional stillness. The world was excessive in both feeling and expressing it.

Alongside imagination, the intensity of feelings was lived in a similar way to how it was written about. A witness of the Romantic time remains the story of Mary Shelley. After finding her husband’s body on the Italian shores, her friend removed his heart from the burning body and gave it to Mary to keep and preserve — which she did. For Percy’s heart had belonged only to her. The story, with the flow of time, became legend, retaining the same tenderness as the envisioned tales.

Every era carries its own charm and unique way of journeying through life. When discussing sentiments, the greatest stories often turn out to be tragic ones.

Emily Brontë captured such a poignant connection in her book. The love between Cathy and Heathcliff was passionate and true, and destructive in its loss. The line, “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” describes the ultimate ideal of love that remained a directional anchor for bonds until modern times. Cathy and Heathcliff were not just “soulmates” (partners who seem to understand one another without saying a word, and who can lean on each other in any situation), but represented a pre-modern fusion of identity — the collapse of individuality into shared being. Their love was rooted deeply in mutual affection that grew over time into profound friendship. Shared time became the safe background of their fondness, which could have survived everything but society’s expectations. Once faced with class difference and the social stigma their love might carry, Cathy’s withdrawal suggested more fear of general judgment than lack of emotional longing. And, as it often happens in narration, the second before articulating the truth, the crumbling has already begun, and the future, as tragic as literature requires, finds no way to correct the misstep.

Are we even capable of experiencing such a tendency toward another today?

On the one hand, modern society has brought the impression of having “options,” of having the possibility to connect with a numerous amount of individuals, which, on the contrary, has created “speed dating” — moving from one person to another, keeping encounters on the surface level.

The same trend developed mostly on dating apps, removing the willingness to get to know another person properly. And, as psychological theory suggests, only by being truly close to someone can we actually fall for them. Love is a decision, not just mere attraction. In the age of Romanticism, love was seen as a form of fate. It was believed that feelings were above human influence, and that what was meant to be would happen regardless of circumstances, timing, and actions. In a culture built on negotiation, devotion appears irrational, because it removes responsibility for our actions. While in theory we are oriented toward partnership as a form of intercession, the numerous possibilities in reality make us less concerned about our actions, as if when one romance goes wrong, another will spontaneously appear.

Susan Sontag predicted this drift in her book On Photography (1977). She described capitalist society as “a culture based on images. (…) The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.” When translated into the problematic of romantic relationships and partnerships, it points to a community that lives on projection — as the idea of having access to someone’s aesthetic becomes equalized with admittance into their time. Exposure and intimacy have crossed paths, creating a reality built on fictitious beliefs. This reposition is not neutral. When exposure replaces intimacy, desire becomes safer but thinner. We protect ourselves from disappointment by remaining partially detached, yet in doing so we also prevent the slow formation of attachment. The system that values images discourages the kind that binds without reserve.

Envisioning relationships is almost like living in a dreamlike reality, with partners whose major part of identity is constructed inside our minds, as a byproduct of fantasies, desires, and imagined potential traits.

But dreams are risky to translate into reality. They risk the disappointment of clearly seeing that what we long for is not what stands in front of us — and in attempting to save ourselves from disappointment, we move further away from the possibility of exploring and developing something that could turn beautiful and, first of all, real.

Looking at Cathy and Heathcliff, their love was based on deep connection and long, almost lifelong friendship. Even if it is considered “safe” to be confidants before becoming lovers, their bond turned destructive on both sides because it could not carry the return of absence and parallel lives experienced up close.

In modern terms, that is the kind of affection we feel safe only observing from a distance — admiring it while keeping shallowness in reality. What remains on the surface level cannot produce collapse or pain in the way the separation of something deep and meaningful can.

Perhaps the return of Wuthering Heights to the screen is not nostalgic form of confession. We return to stories of fusion and devastation not because we wish to suffer as Cathy and Heathcliff did, but because we no longer permit ourselves to attach with such irreversibility. We have reorganised intimacy around preservation: of autonomy, of emotional stability, of exit routes. Cinema, then, becomes the chamber where intensity can unfold without demanding consequence. On screen, love still risks collapse. In life, we negotiate to avoid it. The tragedy is no longer that devotion destroys us; it is that we have structured our world so carefully that it rarely has the chance to begin.

Whenever an end happens to a memory, it is destined to remain alone, to accompany time in the way time has accompanied us.

The endless play that is set seems like a chapter from an absurd novel: sensation drops from the present into the rational part; they become a thought. Once formed, a thought contains only the summary of what was detected. And, as the final act, instants collect conception to achieve it, freeing space to experience new beginnings. The tendency to put everything into words, if articulated too soon, only hastens the process. We struggle to feel without clarity of our senses, yet once justified, the same sensations become part of an inner narrative; almost a story we tell ourselves.

But narrations are only half real. They exist because of their closeness to the mirage. Just as in love, there is this illusion — the illusion that we will never be able to forget.

We tend to keep small objects close, only to remind us of the intensity that once was factual; we keep revisiting the same places that hold the ghosts of the past.

Just as in love, illusion tries to find its way to fight oblivion.

Forgetting might be a form of time’s protecting us. Time takes the role of the saviour, keeping us away from regret, away from hope for return. What belongs to the past is ruled by different laws already, so that the very idea of adjusting it is dangerous to us. Living in memory keeps the present secondary, yet its aliveness seems to bring it right at the place where it was lost. Why is everything that we feel transforming into a thought after all?

The echo from the past feels still from afar. Once looked at, it bruises like touch, reminding us that its place is away; that what has passed belongs to another world, that it can’t be held back. Even by occupying the space of one’s mind, souvenirs tend to lose their shape. Recollection is never real, but almost a dream-like ghost of something that was once lived.

Unlike familiar fancy, which seeks immediate satisfaction, longing is often directed toward something vast, undefined, or firmly out of reach, such as a lost home, a past love, a better version of oneself, or an idealised, unattainable future. A bittersweet pull toward something that you want but may never get because the idea is so far away, it is a feeling of joy and angst that often comes with the knowledge that what you long for is firmly out of your reach. Manifested as a quiet detachment from the present moment, similar to a daydream, such as when one gets lost in thought while looking into the distance, the emotion of longing is, by its nature, cinematic. For the distant gaze that loses itself in the city’s greyish streets, and a line that half names the emotion, produce the same intrigue as the image of an elegant figure, dressed in black, whose mind melts into the dawn’s light and, by its existence, asks for romantic documentation, which naturally comes in cinema.

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Maybe the most famous cinematic articulation of the emotional tendency toward a parallel life, In the Mood for Love captures two people falling deeply for one another while never crossing the line. The connection remains mental, in mutual attraction, admiration, and seemingly platonic love. The desire is shared, but never truly consumed. The passion is felt, even articulated, but respect for social norms is stronger than the inner impulse. The absence, in that way, becomes connection. After the shared chapter of life, the parting comes as the conservation of the feeling. Opposite of forgetting, which tends to erase details, the separation keeps the possibility even more vivid, for the tendency to “remember” the unlived life only grows stronger when left to the imagination alone. The gaps in the interactions, by being repeated, become more meaningful, and the distance becomes a certain glorification of a missed chance for happiness.

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

The feeling of loving someone deeply while not being with them. To share moments every day, to talk, to connect, to see them up close and still not consume the feelings. Supported by the delay in even naming them, this kind of romance points to the fact that not all loves are meant to be lived — some are meant to teach us about ourselves, and by educating us, to awaken us emotionally. The yearning in this narrative continues even after the consummation, for the affair was short-lived and never fully fulfilled, leaving space for desire to exist within the long articulation of time. Liaisons have the power to prolong the ending, or at least the impression of its extension. Once the depth of intimacy has been experienced, the memory of sentimental intensity remains, fighting the passage of time, causing almost obsessive repetition. What is remembered as the “ache of desire” becomes what we tend to look for in every following encounter.

Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

Longing entangled with forgetting. Holding onto the memory of something long gone, embodied in a short-lived affair. The emotion documented in this film is confusing because it plays with our tendency to remember, to forget, to feel, and to let feelings fade. The bond between the two of them is, by nature, impossible, and even though it remains so, it is deepened by reminiscence of the past, by bringing forward almost forgotten desire from time gone by. Oblivion, as the opposite of yearning, becomes a driving force to collect the ruins of memory, with the attempt to keep the feeling-tone alive, at least in segments. The film approaches beautifully the propensity to hold onto something even more precisely because it will soon be gone.

Brief Encounter (1945)

Train platforms, cafés, scheduled departures. Love constrained by an almost unbearable sense of responsibility.

The two protagonists do not hesitate because they doubt the depth of their attachment. They hesitate because they understand it too well. The intensity arrives quickly, almost recklessly, and then must be contained within the rigidity of marriage, duty, reputation. What makes the longing endure is its incompletion. Their meetings are fragments, stolen hours suspended between domestic routines. Each encounter feels both miraculous and already over. They speak of practicalities while their voices betray a tremor neither dares to acknowledge fully.

The absence that follows is a continuation — a private chamber in which the unlived version of their life persists, untouched by reality.

La Dolce Vita (1960)

The feeling of a hunger that refuses to attach itself to any single face. Marcello moves through nights of glamour and excess, yet remains unmoored, perpetually searching for a depth that never quite materialises.

Women pass through his life like reflections in golden ideals. Attraction is present, sometimes even tenderness, but never completion. The desire here is directed toward an idea of transcendence rather than toward an individual.

This is longing without object: the ache for a purity one recognises too late, when it is already inaccessible.

Lost in Translation (2003)

Two people meet in a foreign city, suspended between languages and obligations, and discover in each other a familiarity that feels older than the circumstances that brought them there. They move through neon nights not as lovers but as confidants in exile. The restraint is almost tender, as a mutual decision to preserve the delicacy of what exists.

What makes the longing so enduring is its transience. They know, from the beginning, that this connection cannot extend beyond the hotel lobby, beyond the duration of their stay. And precisely because it is temporary, it becomes luminous.

When they part, nothing dramatic occurs. A whisper, unheard by the audience, seals the experience. The ambiguity protects the feeling from being reduced.

Carol (2015)

Two women recognise each other not as strangers but as inevitabilities, and yet the world around them insists on interruption. What makes the longing so piercing is not prohibition alone, but timing. They meet at the precise moment when one is beginning to dissolve her former life and the other is not yet ready to claim a new one.

Their separation does not extinguish the connection, distance works like a lens, sharpening what proximity could not articulate. Letters replace touch. Memory replaces what was supposed to be lived. In this film, longing is the knowledge that something rare has occurred, and that losing it does not annul its truth. It simply makes it more exact.

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Feelings can be real even when lived only internally. Admiration, even adoration, for someone can coexist with the maintenance of formal distance. Paradoxically, this only deepens desire.

Human psychology, especially in the realm of attraction, is in many ways paradoxical. It tends to fantasise about desires that are out of reach, entering the so-called phase of “crystallisation.” Defined by the French author Stendhal in De l’amour (1822), the beginning of love is marked by the idealisation of the other. Like a branch thrown into a salt mine that begins to glitter with crystals, in the early stages of admiration the object of love appears perfect. Similar to the idea that beauty exists in the eye of the observer, the apotheosis of someone’s qualities often becomes intertwined with their absence. For absence creates a gap that the mind instinctively tries to fill.

From a point of view that has always been drawn to life as a deeply sentimental experience, rather than a materialistic one, the rarest and most profound object that can be gifted is not an object at all—but time.

Time spent together. Time to walk around the city at night, sharing nocturnal silence. Time to deepen a friendship. Time spent in beautiful places, talking about beautiful things. In other words, time that we carry with us as a souvenir of the person who shared it, and that we may return to decades later.

The Three Kinds of Time Behind a Meaningful Gift

1. Time of Attention

The art of noticing details about another person is a valuable attitude. A good gift fills daily habits and answers unspoken interests. It might be something used in life, within spontaneous actions, and still contain the reminiscence of thought.

A vintage lighter for her who smokes “à la parisienne.” A black notebook for her, full of ideas that sometimes get lost due to her tendency to move too fast. A vintage object that reminded you of her because of shared characteristics only you noticed. A subscription to the journals she would like to read. A vinyl record you know they’ll love, or one they should love. A weekend spent in her favourite city, so that you share the same memory afterwards. A museum membership that begins each week’s conversation with, “Did you see the exhibition that’s opening?”

The best gifts prove you were listening when nothing was asked.

2. Time of Waiting

Some gifts need to wait for the right moment. Waiting signals intention. Urgency often signals anxiety.

Thinking of someone months in advance. Planning a shared day. Buying a vintage object that only she would style perfectly, and keeping it aside, letting it ripen until the occasion. The time you let something rest gives a similar effect to crystallisation, making it feel more intimate and more special. As often happens with things put on hold, the longer they remain suspended, the more they mean once realised.

3. Time of Restraint

Choosing less when more is possible is the ultimate rule of elegance. And less, in this sense, means choosing what is essential. Allowing space for the receiver’s imagination is what completes the gesture.

A night at the opera can say much more than checking items off a wish list. Of course, a bag would be lovely. Or jewellery. But these tend to feel extravagant in many cases. If something arrives too easily, it often becomes part of our possessions—which is also a way of forgetting.

Even when gifting objects, they can feel more special when the intention is personal. When gifting a book to a friend who loves culture, finding an older edition that carries context, and not only words, shows that the thought lay in where it was found, not only in what it is about. A small detail, yet meaningful. A silk blouse you know she will wear alone at home, yet that will evoke sensuality and happiness in her.

The most generous gifts are the ones that stay with us. The ones that resist the passing of time (and trends), and that we return to again and again. This is why shared moments matter so much: they become accents in life that rarely fade from memory. And a thought, once transmitted to another’s mind, is priceless.

This guide is not for last-minute decisions.

Love,

Greta