Inside Me. Soul.
In Italian, ‘anima’, from the Greek ‘anemos’, breath, wind.
In many religions and philosophies, the soul is the vital and spiritual part of a living being.
Indeed, if there is something that every human creature possesses with absolute certainty, however elusive it may be, it is the soul.

Sometimes we forget about it: it’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, an obstacle. But it’s there.

That divine breath that inspires everything that is invisible in us and from which everything is born: inclinations, passions, loves, emotions, anxieties, melancholies, joys, torments.

It is the expression of the true essence of the human being, what makes him unique, his interior world, his deepest part. It marks his way of being and living, it makes him the individual that he is, and every individual is an infinite, unfathomable universe.
There are simpler souls, other more complex ones, multifaceted but not necessarily less pure than the former.

The soul is frailty, it is memory of a bygone time, it is a whisper lost in time, it gives protection against the harshness of the world. It preserves vivid visual and auditory sensations that re-emerge in the most difficult moments. We often go astray… but we
need to learn to protect our soul, to listen to it, to caress it. If life is a journey in discovery of oneself, it cannot fail to be a journey in discovery of one’s soul. There are special places where we are able to find it again, we know it’s there, in that place at that time, it’s where we are truly able to sense it.

And so, in this issue of LYF, we have told of different souls, personalities, individualities. Ironically, certainly, but with an attentive eye for the different facets of the human being. We have portrayed cold souls, refined ones, gay ones, bold, austere, melancholy,
romantic, visionary, searching, introspective, coloured souls, and so on.
With texts and images, some designer friends have left us a splendid cross-section of their personal individualities. We are grateful to them.

For those who say that we live better without heeding our soul, I answer with a to-the-point quotation from the contemporary French writer and poet Christian Bobin.

Happy reading!

“We can very well live without a soul. It happens very often and there is no reason to make
a big deal of it. The only problem is that things don’t come back to you when you call them
by their names. You can be absent from your own life and cheat everybody about this
absence – everybody except animals, trees and things.” (Translation by Alison Anderson)