Letter to the youth for a humanistic revolution

each day I think of you as the very heart of the world. When I was a child, my gaze was fixed upon my parents, and from their actions, particularly in those early years, I learned the rules of life — those rules that instinct, in its natural course, could not bestow upon me.

I look to you, young ones, and I see you both in times past and within the Tempus Novum that is about to come.

We must nourish ourselves with hope, but hope alone may not suffice. We must, therefore, put action into practice — an enlightened kind of humanistic revolution, guided by memory and fixed upon the morrow. For the future is a promise and a gift that awaits us — that awaits you, women and men of tomorrow — and we must desire it; this is the purpose of values, which confer meaning upon life.

For dozens of centuries, we have upheld values which are today, at times, called into question. Much is said of change, and of adapting to change as the only path to happiness. Yet it is equally true that values are however intrinsic to the human condition, and for this reason they dwell in the realm of the eternal. Surely, without them, the Tempus Novum that lies ahead would become a hollow mirage. The ancient philosophers taught us that happiness is not a right, but a legitimate aspiration — a goal achieved through the harmony of heart and mind.

If there is a season of life in which values are born, it is youth — when every feeling, every daring thought, every passion is one with the formidable vigour of nature: that which grants us blazing sunsets, sublime dawns, the wind, the sun, and the fragrance of a thousand flowers blooming spontaneously in the fields, who knows from what corner of the earth.

I see you, young ones, as one of those flowers — full of vigour, perfumed with your dreams, and adorned by the faraway horizons your soul inhabits. Youth appears to me as the most enchanted and fertile of places. My every memory of those times is steeped in meanings which, today, I only faintly perceive in rare, special moments. I know, however, that nothing is as it once was, when imagination could transform a simple carved wooden boat into an ocean liner crossing the seas. That piece of wood meant far more than its shape and substance.

Around us, we sometimes perceive a kind of malaise of the soul — a lack of longing. But Plato, in his poetic myth of Poros and Penia — the parents of Eros —told us with enchanting words that desire is born of lack. Love, to me, is a sublime condition, but if you wish it to endure, let yourself be missed, if only a little, by the one you love.

I do not know, my dear young ones, whether these words caress your soul. But if you desire the New Time — if you wish to render it real and vibrant — you must inhabit it with that sense of measure the Greeks taught us, slowly, respecting it as children of Creation. Only then will it not be lost to the winds, but endure eternally. Of this I am certain: such a future cannot come to pass without a humanistic revolution — and you may well be its engine.

Remember that school is a privilege; for a time it educates you, and then it instructs you. Be grateful to school, which brings you close to books—and even these, in order to be truly desired, must sometimes be absent. We shall cherish them more if we must seek them out in a library, borrow them, and treat them with utmost care, knowing we shall soon return them.

A library, said the Emperor Hadrian, is like a granary of the soul. Nourish yourselves, young ones, with that grain; experience the library not as a repository of knowledge, but as a generator of wisdom. From those books, the dream of a humanistic revolution may be born.

Aristotle said that the mind cannot be opened unless the heart is opened first. So you — yes, you — who live in every corner of this vast world where I imagine you, you who suffer today from a kind of malaise of the soul: arm yourselves with dreams, with fraternity, with gentleness, with measure. With these gentle weapons, I beg you, become the protagonists of a humanistic revolution, one that turns towards the Tempus Novum.

My dear young ones, I urge you—challenge those wise men; maybe their reflections, the ones you’ve read, weren’t as sharp as they could have been. Instead, be the mirror of another reality — the one I see, and not I alone — of young people full of love, symbols of life, brave of heart, treasure chests of precious stones, expressions of a nature that ceaselessly creates. They are in need of something only we — parents, grandparents, adults — can offer you: a listening ear, a word, a caress; such things are the very fuel of the soul.