Photo: Stefania Lucchetti portrait by Emma Terenzio
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“There is a side of us which exists beyond time
a part of the mind which dwells outside of time”
Excerpt from the poem “Without Time” included in the contemporary poetry collection Coffee Stains on My Books, Stefania Lucchetti, 2024Purchase the book to read the full poem
“Past and future are different. Causes precede effects. Pain follows the wound, it does not anticipate it. The glass shatters into a thousand pieces, and the thousand pieces do not reassemble into the glass. We cannot change the past; we may have regrets, remorse, memories of happiness. The future, on the other hand, is uncertainty, desire, restlessness, open space, perhaps destiny. We can live it, choose it, because it is not yet; everything is possible within it. Time is not a line with two equal directions; it is an arrow with different ends.” Excerpt from The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, Penguin
In a jewel of a little book called The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli – Italian physicist, essayist, and science communicator – discusses time, its meaning, and its passage.
Time flows at different speeds, time holds different meanings, yet time is linear. Time is duration, time is circumstance, time is space and attention.
And then there are those moments when time seems to stop, when past, present, and future appear to align coherently in the same instant—fleeting and rare. In those moments, we rediscover parts of ourselves that seem to exist beyond time.
“Without Time“ is a poem that explores the idea of an inner dimension that transcends time – an aspect of being that exists beyond linearity, beyond the sequence of hours and days. It is an inner space that is vast and boundless, a dimension in which being is no longer constrained by the limits of the body or circumstances but expands, touching and embracing everything with grace. This vision of freedom is wise and unhurried, a wisdom that sees beyond what time allows us to perceive, intuitively grasping what is “undefined” and difficult to seize in ordinary reality.
At times, this dimension detaches from the normal flow of time, drifting away from the concreteness of daily life. In this wondrous space, there is sometimes the risk of becoming lost, and so it is necessary to find the way back to reality—but with gentleness, respecting the being’s need to explore both dimensions: the temporal and the timeless.
The poem, therefore, celebrates the harmony between time and timelessness, a journey in which the two dimensions coexist, enriching human experience through the contrast and interplay between what is finite and what is infinite, between what is fleeting and what is eternal.
Carlo Rovelli himself understands this well, as he writes:
“Perhaps a deep root of science is poetry: the ability to see beyond the visible.”
Bookstore event photos
Some photos of the book signing event at Giunti Al Punto Bookstore
Guest Author
In this edition, I talk about a contemporary Italian author I recently had the opportunity to discover and appreciate: Salvatore Annunziata. Salvatore Annunziata was born on 29 May 1981 in Pompei, where he currently lives. He also authored Mondo parallelo (2010) and Dello stesso amore (2013).
His poem Nel Giorno is part of his collection published by Italic Pequod, titled Altro tempo e qualche poesia intorno alla luce.
“And tomorrow / the dawn / will continue to make us trust / in time” (Salvatore Annunziata) (translated by Stefania Lucchetti)
Nel Giorno (In the Day), as the author himself explains, is a poem about the relationship with absence, with the emptiness that follows grief or loss—a relationship, therefore, with our time, not with the time of those who have left
Reviews
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