Waiting for a Face
Simone Riva - January 18, 2026
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
The Provocation: A Friendship Through Screens
This is a risky article, one that addresses an immense and difficult-to-decipher issue. It stems from the desire to share a provocation that first struck the writer. During the week, one of my students told me something curious. More than a year ago, she met a girl on the internet who lives in Asia, and they started writing to each other—in English, of course. She talked to me about this friendship as if her friend were someone she actually sees every day, so much so that she said to me, "Even though it happens through a screen, we feel everything as if it were real life."
So far, nothing strange. I reflected on the power that a letter, a book, a song, or a work of art can have. But then she added, "We discovered we have a lot in common, such as our love for a fictional character." At the time, this detail surprised me quite a bit. How can you form such a bond with an imaginary character and, moreover, believe they can enter the sphere of your dearest affections?
But something about my skepticism didn't sit right with me, and I was reminded of Tolkien—someone who carried his imagination so far that he even invented a new language.
Tolkien and the Test of Imagination
"Fantasy remains a human right: we create it in our own measure and in our own derivative way, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Creator," said the English genius when speaking of fairy tales. Looking at his life, one might almost say that the more reality becomes our friend, the more our creativity and imagination grow. It's a kind of litmus test. These days, I think often about that conversation we had in class, because it opened up a new way for me to look at everything we hold in our minds—things with which it is not always easy to reconcile ourselves.
John the Baptist: Waiting for One Already Present
In this Sunday's Gospel, we encounter John the Baptist who, seeing Jesus, exclaims aloud, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (Jn 1:29). He uses symbolic language, the language most familiar to him, to define this man who is decidedly outside the norm. Jesus gives the Baptist all the time he needs to discover the significance of his presence, which exceeds all his imagination. In the meantime, it is John himself who waits for the One he has pointed out as the Messiah and who has finally come among men. He must wait for One who is already present.
The Poet's Work in Darkness
We can only imagine what reality has already ignited within us in a unique way, sometimes without giving us the words to describe it. This compels us to seek the new, the unprecedented, the original, the unusual—just as poets do, who "...work at night / when time does not press upon them, / when the noise of the crowd is silent / and the lynching of the hours ends. / Poets work in the dark / like night hawks or nightingales / with their sweet song / and fear offending God. / But poets, in their silence / make much more noise / than a golden dome of stars" (Alda Merini, Testamento, Crocetti 1988).
An Antidote to Distraction
How wonderful it would be to look at others, whoever they may be, as new poets and, at the same time, to value our imagination—the first echo of reality—as the most effective remedy against predictability and distraction, and as an antidote to the temptation to surrender our freedom in order to indulge the narratives of the moment. Learning this language, ancient and ever new, allows us to say things that would otherwise be unspeakable and invites us to seek the generous silence in whose embrace every gift is kept.
Useless words, empty speeches, peremptory judgments, partial opinions would suddenly find themselves out of place—incapable by nature of sustaining the expectation that the other will reveal themselves and that their "imaginary characters" will slowly take on a face and a name.
Key Insights
• Imagination is not escapism—it is the "first echo of reality," growing stronger through attentive encounter with the world.
• Tolkien's invented languages show how deep friendship with reality expands creative possibility.
• John the Baptist models Christian waiting: expecting One who is already present.
• Patient attention allows the other's true face to emerge.
• Silence creates space for authentic revelation.
