²A forgotten film roll yields a photo from Sardinia.
I have often experienced a feeling of anxiety, at crossroads. It seems to me that here, or close by, a couple of steps away on the path I didn't take and which is already receding – that just over there a more elevated kind of country would open up, where I might have gone to live. (...)
I turn again to the horizon. Here, we are afflicted by a curious unease of spirit,or else some snag in appearance, some fault in the manifest surface of the earth, which deprives us of the good it could do us. Over there, due to the clearer contour of a valley, or to lightning immobilized one day in the sky, or maybe thanks to a more nuanced language, or a tradition preserved, or to a feeling we don't have (I cannot and will not choose among these things), a people exists who—in a place that resembles them—have secret dominion over the world . . .
(Yves Bonnefoy, L'arrière-pays)