>reboot: why I opened this journal

When a device or a system goes through a major change or turns unstable, a reboot is the most efficient measure. The manual doesn’t prescribe it; practice teaches it. I suspected my modus operandi was due for a reboot — before it needed a full wipe.

After 5 years as a History teacher, having worked in 10 schools and taught a number of students on the order of 10³, I felt it was time to take another road. Having drawn timelines on the board countless times — simplified representations of human time laid over historical temporality —, it became ever more evident that I was reaching a point of inflection. An event, an événement. History is a game of continuities — and of ruptures, especially.

A concept much cited in the theory of History is „Entfremdung“, borrowed from Hegelian philosophy. It is the feeling of meaning draining out of one’s daily work, the loss of any sense of purpose in society. I don’t speak German, but the word translated exactly what I was feeling. Before the estrangement of the daily routine could truly alienate me, I had to make a hard decision: I resigned from my post as a teacher. More than that, I chose to exile myself from the classroom.

Like anyone who lives in banishment — whether exiled by force or self-deported —, I had to face the pains of separation. I miss, above all, every being I shared a classroom with. Our paths forked, but their stories stay with me.

Never before in my life had I managed to keep a journal. Yet what once looked like effort is now a necessity. I write because it brings me closer to what has grown distant. I write because the raw act of carving the grain of paper with a pen helps me remember what is real. Whether painted on the rock at Altamira or Lascaux, pressed into the clay tablets of Nineveh, or copied onto vellum in the codices of Monte Cassino — what matters is neither the medium nor the material. It is the need. And the hand obeys the inevitable: whether writing in a notebook or typing on the dark screen of a terminal.