CROSSING THE DESERT

They call it the Empty Quarter. A name that sounds like something out of an ancient tale, belonging more to legend than to geography.

The Rubʿ al-Khali is a vast expanse of sand. Its dunes stretch as far as the eye can see, some rising two hundred metres into the air. Look in any direction and there is no road, no building, no sign telling you: you are here.

After all, if the other three quarters of the world are made of air, water and earth, in this last quarter there seems to be nothing left.

Only sand.

Here, you could almost mistake dawn for sunset, and the only sound that breaks the silence is the breath of the wind, forever reshaping the landscape, shifting the dunes and erasing every trace — perhaps just to keep alive the legend that has always surrounded the desert.

And yet, people have passed through.

For centuries, Bedouin caravans crossed this inhospitable land, travelling over mountains of sand and learning to find their way through a landscape that was constantly changing shape.

There were no roads to follow. They knew where the earth concealed its water and, when the sun disappeared and the desert seemed to grow even larger, they looked up. The stars gave them their bearings.

I find it fascinating that they learned to live precisely there, in a place that seems to be the very opposite of everything we associate with life. And that, in the midst of all that nothingness, if someone appeared on the horizon, it did not matter where they came from: there would be water, food and shelter from the wind waiting for them.

An open tent.

Perhaps there are things you understand sooner in the desert than anywhere else.

Here, in the elsewhere we inhabit, I’m not sure we have quite understood them. And yet I have the strange feeling that, for some time now, we too have been wandering through a desert.

I don’t know exactly when we entered it. Perhaps that is precisely the problem.

Had there been a border, a barrier, a sign saying BEYOND THIS POINT, THE WORLD AS YOU KNEW IT ENDS, we probably would have noticed. We would have stocked up on water. Checked the compass. Asked ourselves whether we really wanted to go any further.

Instead, we arrived here little by little. First a few trees disappeared. Then the grass began to thin. Then the ground started to dry out. But each day the landscape looked enough like the day before that there never seemed to be much cause for concern.

So we kept walking. After all, stopping wasn’t an option.

And now we are here.

From a distance, this desert looks empty. But once you are inside it, you discover that it is incredibly full. The trouble is, it is full of empty things.

Noise, for example.

Voices coming from every direction. Someone shouts that they know the way. Someone else insists there is no way at all. Some point to a mirage and swear they can see a city; some sell maps they drew the night before; others promise water, as long as you are willing to follow them.

Everyone talks. Very few listen.

This imitation of a desert we have somehow found ourselves in has another strange quality: stay in it long enough and you begin to believe the world has always been this way.

Perhaps that is one of the things that frightens me most. Getting used to it. The ability to straighten a chair while the house is burning.

And that is how the desert grows. Not because someone designed the whole thing at once. It grows slowly, every time we stop asking a question, every time we choose a simple answer over a true one, every time we give up trying to understand something because we have already decided what we think about it. A grain of sand, after all, is only a grain of sand. But every time we look at another human being and, before we even see the person, search for the category they belong to — foreigner, rich, poor, woman, man, old, young, us, them — the desert grows.

Some might say that, in all this desolation, a very “convenient” way of making our way through the world has been found: divide it. Divide, classify, sort. Even children. I imagine them all standing in line before an enormous sheet of graph paper while someone looks for the right box for each of them. Age. Behaviour. Performance. Attention. Ability. Difficulty. Conforming. Non-conforming. The available categories have already been written across the top of the grid; all the child has to do is find a way to fit into one of them. And if something sticks out — a thought, an incomprehensible fantasy, a pace different from everyone else’s, a question no one expected — then a name has to be found for that too. Measure it. Classify it. If possible, give it another box.

As though childhood were an assembly line designed to produce human beings compatible with the same instruction manual.

And meanwhile, we keep walking.

We are tired. Perhaps that matters too. Because when you are tired, it can feel as though the only answer is to ask someone which way to go. It hardly matters where, as long as they sound certain.

But exhaustion has a way of hiding another reality: one made of disappointment, broken promises and blatant inhumanity.

“I have a headache and the universe aches with me,” Fernando Pessoa wrote.

And that headache can become so unbearable that, eventually, we stop caring about the universe. We stop asking ourselves how we got here and, desperate for a way out, place our trust in those who claim to know it — forgetting that they are the very same people who led us here, exhausted.

In the desert, people without doubts acquire a peculiar kind of appeal. They always know the way and, more importantly, they always know who is to blame. The solution is invariably simple: get rid of something, drive someone out, turn back, close a door, build a wall.

Simple solutions have always done remarkably well in complicated times.

They look like water.

At least from a distance.

Then you get closer and realise it was a mirage.

There is one thing, though, that reassures me: this burning house still bothers me.

And I imagine I’m not the only one.

Perhaps as long as there are things we still find intolerable, as long as injustice still makes our blood boil, as long as a simple answer is not enough for us, then we haven’t grown used to it.

But what if we are the Bedouins of this desert?

The ones who fight exhaustion, habit, and that terrible temptation to believe there is nothing left worth searching for.

Then we will have to learn to recognise mirages. To remember that in the desert your eyes can deceive you, especially when you are thirsty. And that when night falls, you can keep walking, looking to the stars for direction.

Because if, here in this quarter of the universe that seems empty, we keep waiting for someone to show us the way, perhaps we have forgotten something:

There are no roads here. The wind erases them. The dunes shift. What was a passage yesterday may no longer be one today. And perhaps that is precisely our opportunity.

I know. Put like that, it sounds absurd: to find ourselves in the desert and call it good news. And yet, part of me believes it is.

Emptiness is frightening as long as we think it has to be filled with something we already know. But emptiness is also space. Space to imagine something that does not yet exist. To think beyond the roads already travelled. To search for new paths to where the water flows. Perhaps crossing the desert does not mean finding the road. Perhaps it means having enough imagination to draw one where there was none before, and enough humanity to leave an open tent along the way.

To keep walking, in other words.

Knowing that no matter how endless the desert may seem when you are inside it, somewhere, sooner or later, it ends.

Ilaria Serpi