To grasp one’s own uniqueness in the context of humanity is a difficult task in our time, obsessed as it is with individualism or universalism.

The ideal process of intellectual maturity proceeded even a few decades ago, in concentric circles, outward from the village to which one belonged towards an awareness of the moral unity of the human family. Electronic communication, eliminating the spatial distances and contracting the planet, has almost reversed this process. Today, the first awareness is that of the total space; only the most insightful can retrace their way back to where they are, to those places of their birth and of their habitation that shape the unconscious. Without this sense of the interpenetration between place and being, one cannot speak of personal, intellectual and artistic identity—a sense that Nivola expressed flawlessly in his work.