For several years now we have lived a large part of our lives on social networks. I would say we devote almost as much attention to them as to our most intimate emotional surroundings. Almost all of us are hooked—nearly addicted. These networks seem designed to trigger some reward system in the brain, releasing a quick shot of dopamine each time we receive the tribe’s approval. It’s a flash of instant gratification that urges us to keep typing, and at the same time keeps us staring at the screen when that approval doesn’t come. That’s on one side.

On the other, they are a source of distraction that frees us from the tedium of daily life. Like a cool cave that moves along with us. A permanent refuge that welcomes us whenever boredom, stress, or the mediocrity of existence overflows our threshold. By now, I hope we’ve accepted that we all live amid a thorny environment that demands suffering in exchange for fleeting pleasure.

We want to escape reality. All of us. That’s why—when we’re not being driven by the whip of work—we spend so much time in the clouds… floating in the tepid broth of a dolce far niente free of remorse and guilt. This barren plateau where we practice the asepsis of idleness needs constructions, visual metaphors, so that the soul can find its way through the mists of anguish. Little landscapes, pretty settings, brief tales—snipers that, whenever our critical sense dares to emerge to judge them by some criterion, blow its head clean off.

It is of these images I want to speak. I want to be that enemy sniper who, upon spotting “the other,” puts—if he isn’t too thick-browed—a bullet between his brows.

Look at this charming little thing. So harmonious, so absurd. A snow‑laden landscape, yet somehow warm. Stalks of grass hold up pounds of snow with improbable grace. The water, placidly mirroring them, looks like radioactive foam. The mist conceals the sutures of yarn and telephone wire that stitch one image to another. It reaches precisely to the heron’s far side, where it seems to hover between the pinkish marsh and the blurred fence post. Look closely: its legs enter the blur.

The image proposes a reality pushed to the edge—possible, though hardly likely—that lets us peek into a world of whispers and peace, a world functioning as sanctuary. Yet the heron seems to ask why the sinking or rising sun appears so “Kilimanjaro‑like,” or Amazonian… or fiery, or soporific. If we sink with the crane suspended over that intimate cryogenic swamp, we drift away from every debt—all of them: the “I have to do this before…” the dentist, the mechanic… pure escape.

And what a fortunate composition, my friends. The little sun placed dead center. On one side, the wild grasses; on the other, the big bird. In the foreground, the balustrade guarding that primordial paradise. Before that foreground, men and women narrow their eyes and climb aboard the first train bound for a “who‑cares‑where.” And no—I am not suggesting we take the blue pill offered by Morpheus… there are many authentic images if we wish to slide down that slope. We will share them as well, alongside these tricksters. These texts belong to—and will be gathered under—a section we shall call Snapshots. Soon.