What is old is new, only different.

Once you learn the alphabet and you know how to read, once you’re friends with Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Camus, Borges, Marquez, Kis and Eco, once you have seen Fellini, Bertolucci, Pasollini, Antonioni, Bergman, Tarkowski, Godard, Mikhailkov, once you are fine with Bach’s English Concerto performed by Ralph Kirkpatrick , Glenn Gould or Pogorelich, once you learn Rachmaninov’s 2nd piano concerto by heart (Ashkenazy), once you distinguish Rubinstein from Chopin, once you go to Barbican and hear the London Symphony Orchestra performing Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major conducted by Andre Previn, once you’ve experienced your own silence, once you see Italy on a 250 cc East German motorbike with your girlfriend, sip your espresso on Lido, once you’re astonished by El Duomo, once you say hello to Leonardo, Michelangelo and Botticelli, once you try real Italian pizza made only of a thin crust base, tomato sauce and a few olives in the darkest neighborhood of Bari sometime around midnight of the shortest night of the year, once you wakeup the first time on the cold bench in front of the Notre Dame de Paris and you believe that your life hasn’t started yet, once you start thinking in images, once you recognize all the pages from Jenson’s History of Art (that you browsed so many times, back home, preparing exams) in all major museums from the Uffizi to Reijsk Museum (you even fly for a day to Madrid to spend a couple of hours in ex Thyssen-Bornemisza with a friend (at that time you are both crazy about Monet), once Van Gogh makes you think, once you start putting together Rothko, Pollock and Cage, once you move to Barcelona, spend two whole lives there and you are fluent both in Spanish and Catalan – hence you can understand Dali, Miro, Picaso and Gaudi, therefore you know what Cava and pan amb tomaquet mean, once you go to Nou Camp and hear one hundred thousand people sing together, once you see the sun go down below Palace Pier in Brighton, once you gamble in Vegas and you win, once you are happy in Lugano, Amsterdam, Lausanne, Bath, Bristol, Belgrade, once you see the snows of Matterhorn and sandy beaches of Moorea, Raiatea and Bora Bora, once you promise yourself you will be back to Istanbul just for a tea in the early morning of December, once you promise yourself that you will never go back anywhere, once you know the people around you, but then, the next moment they might not be, once you understand that all the photos you have taken can be deleted in a blink of the eye, once Capa or Henry Cartier Bresson happen to you, once you learn that not everybody had what you had (Gatsby), once you do something that you’re finally happy with, once you understand that sights and sounds are everywhere around us and have always been in one for or another, once you just become aware of the complex hierarchy of lines and shapes that the world is made of, once the importance of the presence of both black and white is your every day bread, once it comes to your mind that it takes everything in order to be able to understand anything, once you’ve stopped thinking that you can express anything perfectly with words no matter how many languages you master, once you love and once you hate, you’ll be fine.

You’ll be just fine.