Five figures of the possible: the wanderer, the leader, the artisan, the stranger, the narrator. Five ways of being in the world that define who we are or could be, as the subtitle of Guido Bosticco’s book Figures of the Possible (Solferino, 2025) emphasizes. They are, in fact, five postures of the soul. But it is fitting that the wanderer comes to meet me first, perhaps because more than the others, they preserve that inner step that becomes gesture, gaze, listening.
Nietzsche, Benjamin, are just some of the authors cited in the book who celebrated walking as a form of knowledge. But no one, I believe, has been able to transform a simple stroll into an act of revelation like Robert Walser. In his small masterpiece, The Walk, going is not meant to reach a place: it serves to encounter it. It is a journey without apparent purpose, a glide across sidewalks, fields, and villages, guided by chance, instinct, and that secret alliance between the eye and the light that only a few can perceive. It is a way of traveling that does not escape pain but carries it with it like a gentle shadow, transforming it into attention, openness, and gratitude.
Similarly, in Guido Bosticco’s book, the wanderer is not the hero of grand itineraries, but one who knows how to pause, how to get lost, how to let the world pass through them. And the other figures, leader, artisan, stranger, narrator, appear to me as variations of this original movement: the leader is a wanderer who guides, who opens paths even when they do not know where they lead; the artisan is a stationary wanderer, walking within matter with infinite patience; the stranger is a wanderer constantly on the border between what they know and what they fear; the narrator is a wanderer of memory, transforming the journey into story, deviation into meaning, aware, Proustianly, of the strength and fragility of recalling, stitching, and rediscovering lost time. All of them, in the end, remind us that we walk even when we remain still. All explore the sense of the possible that Musil sought to integrate with the sense of the real.
This is why the subtitle of the book, mentioned at the beginning, who we are or could be,does not actually ask us to choose a figure, but to recognize that we are made of possibilities, and that each figure of the possible is a different way of inhabiting the world, of welcoming it, of letting it happen.
Ultimately, what the book suggests is surprisingly simple: being present is essential. To be present in step, in gaze, in listening. Nothing is predetermined: no set, no pose. Only the grace of an encounter, a light, a fragment of reality that offers itself to those who know how to see, as happens to me when, as a flâneuse, I feel the need to capture an image that does not exclude my presence, without exaggerating in protagonism but without giving up being there, in our infinite wandering. For the wanderer is one who moves in the world not to reach a place, but to be where beauty, perhaps fleeting, but real, surprisingly occurs.
Guido Bosticco’s volume Figures of the Possible (Solferino) will be presented by the author on Sunday, December 7, 2025, at 11 a.m., at the Città possibile bookstore, via De Amicis 45, Milan.