There are some words that have been traveled over and over again, beaten by intentions that fashions and habits wear down; victims of an excess of use that relegates them to the extremes of embarrassment or banality. Among these, probably, there is also the word “sex”. Yet, a sound so homogeneous and exposed, so insisted in the consonant repetition, refers and can return to a cyclical series of perceptions and revelations that are not measured within a single definition. Anyone who aims at this word with the will to give it only one direction of meaning, somehow fails the attempt to center its deeper, more mature and less obvious meaning. Thus sex is not only the semantic set we are used to (certainly important and conductor of temptations, provocations, relationships, fatalities) but also a higher scale of values ​​to which it is important, at least once in a lifetime, to strive.

What qualifies sex and makes life “sexual” is the vocation to the form we choose to pursue to entertain with ourselves and others a journey of character, trust, dignity. Sexual is the trait of grace that we can express through pleasure, the sensual display of being in the world from a perspective of exposure and introjection.

This style – which is staying now outside, now inside ourselves – reveals the most powerful of secrets: sex is a principle of affirmation, perhaps the most solitary, from which the encounter with the other can intervene and determine a destiny. At this point a lot can become intrinsically sexual: the handwriting of fragility written in clear letters on a woman’s forehead, the glass touched and abandoned on the table, the hand that cuts the air in two very sharp movements, the light of an early morning in open countryside, the sure step of a man hurrying along the street, the dusty climate of a September evening, the day that ends, the air that fades after our breath, the exactness of the gift, the landscape of death, the end and the provisional nature of every torment.