The plain does not conquer a person suddenly, there is no mountain theatricality in it, there are no cliffs that roar with their size, nor a sea that foams as if it wants to swallow the horizon. She does not know about spectacle and does not seduce, but slowly, quietly, persistently dominates a man like time passing through an abandoned house.
Only after many years does a man realize that it got under his skin, in his gait, in the rhythm of his speech, in the way he keeps silent. A man who has lived in the plain for a long time begins to resemble it himself, not in face or body, but in something more difficult to notice: the absence of the need to turn every thing into an event. Learn to distinguish the shades of silence, to hear the change of time before seeing it, and to understand how even the most distant scene can remain motionless for hours, and yet something in it is constantly changing.
The plain is therefore not a landscape but a state of consciousness, and the horizon is not the limit of the world, but its early, ever-present line that shows man how small he is and how much he has nowhere to escape. In the mountains, a person can hide behind stones and rocks, in the forest behind trees, in a city behind a crowd of other people, in a nation behind a God-given Leader, while in the plains he is without shelter, alien, what he is by himself. Everything is in front of the eyes and, what is worse, everything is in the end and in himself. Ravnica does not allow a person the pleasant illusion that there is a solution to what is eating him up somewhere else. If he starts, he can look for miles and miles at the same sky, the same land, and the same distance that keeps receding before him. That's why escaping the plains is often just a change of address, not an actual departure.
Perhaps that is why the plain breeds melancholy better than any other landscape. Not that blasé romantic, salon sadness of poets who suffer with wine and candles, but a basic, earthy melancholy that exudes the mellow of barns, loggias and sheds (as one likes), on wet blackboard and old photographs. It is a grief that has no climax because it never began. It has always been there, like the wind, which in the plains is not a meteorological phenomenon, but a being. An invisible force that passes through the cracks of houses, through old coats, through human thoughts. The wind here knows the names of the streets and the layout of the courtyard, knows which doors creak and through whose window the light no longer comes on. He blows dust, leaves and the little dignity that people leave outside when they no longer have the strength to bring it into the house.
Cities in the plains often look like settlements waiting for something that won't happen, with streets that already have twilight in them at noon and facades that don't decay dramatically and gloriously, but slowly fade, like the face of a man who has given up too long. In them, time is not measured by big events, but by closed shops, empty windows and names that are slowly disappearing from the companies above the entrance.
That's why people from the side of the plains are often bored. They mostly see only the geography and not the psychology of space. They don't understand that endless openness changes a person as much as prison, maybe more, because in the plains, a person has nothing to project his own illusions onto. There is nowhere to hide meaning if there is none. The emptiness here is not the absence of content, but the content itself, something that must be looked at until one stops looking away. That is why the plain produces two types of people: those who run away from it as soon as they can and those who never really leave it, even when they are trapped by some hills and mountains. Those others carry the plain inside them like a disease of silence. In big cities, verticality bothers them, and buildings press on them as if someone were lowering the ceiling on their chest.
They miss the horizon, that terrible emptiness that hurt, but at least it was honest. They also lack the plain knowledge that there may be nothing around the next corner, but that if you look straight ahead long enough, something of yours will appear. And maybe that's the secret of the plain: it doesn't promise much. It does not offer man elevation, it does not give him a dramatic peak from which to understand the world, nor does it lull him to sleep with the sound of waves to forget himself. She leaves him alone, between earth and sky, with enough space to leave and enough emptiness to realize that sometimes there is nowhere to go. Once he learns to bear it, he never sees the plain as a flat land again. It becomes an inner landscape, a place in a person that remains open even when everything else is walled off.
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