di Antonio Napoli
Pharaoh Zoser often visited his architect, Imhotep, hoping to finally see his masterpiece completed. Yet each time, he returned to his palaces with a restless heart, for before him lay only bustling construction sites, half-laid stones, and broken columns stretching toward the sky.
Year after year, doubt tormented him: was the work being deliberately slowed? Was it negligence or a subtle calculation? Patience, the virtue of sages and rulers, began to wear thin under the weight of waiting.
One day, unable to suppress his frustration any longer, he confronted Imhotep. He found him, as always, absorbed in thought, studying plans and proportions with the gaze of one searching for something that does not yet exist.
“Enough of these delays!” Zoser rebuked him. “If I do not see my monument rise in all its grandeur, I will entrust the work to another.”
The architect did not flinch. With a slow gesture, he drew back the curtain from the window and gazed at the city in turmoil, the swarming workers, the sound of hammers striking stone.
“My lord,” he finally said without turning, “there is something you may not understand. My relationship with this work is a contradictory one. Today, it is everything to me, but I know that one day, when it is finished, it will no longer belong to me. I am tormented by the thought that as soon as I lay the final stone, a desire for an even greater, bolder creation—one I cannot yet imagine—will be born within me. What fills me with pride today may disgust me tomorrow. My mind reveals forms and proportions that, once turned to stone, my heart will receive as the conquest of a foreign land. I will never feel at home in any of my creations.”
The pharaoh fell silent. For the first time, he understood that the architect’s obsession was not the pursuit of glory but the relentless yearning for something that always eluded him, retreating like the line of the horizon. And he could not help but recognize in that restlessness a reflection of his own: he too, before his conquests, felt the dissatisfaction of one who, having reached a goal, was already searching for the next.
From that day on, he never returned to question him and turned all his thoughts to his war plans.