The madman walked with a lit lantern in broad daylight, through the crowds, shouting at the top of his lungs:“I am looking for a man, have you seen a man?”
Everyone looked at him, either with amazement or with disdain.
"How can you look for a man when you're surrounded by them?" some laughed. "Look, we are all people here!"
But the madman did not stop. He was not searching for just a bipedal being, not just a body that breathes and walks. He was looking for something deeper, something the crowd no longer recognized—perhaps something they no longer even knew existed...
The madman with the lantern was the only one who saw the darkness in the middle of the day. Among so many faces, so many, all identical, he was searching for a spark, a glimmer of authenticity, of truth.
But everywhere, he found only masks. Every person he met wore a mask, a false smile, empty words...
And the madman knew: this was not what it meant to be human.
To be human means to feel, to think, to question, and to doubt. But the crowds moved mechanically, forgetting themselves, lost in their daily routines, blinded by the false glow of their own certainty.
" I am looking for a man," the madman shouted, but no one understood why...
No one wondered if perhaps he was not the mad one.
Maybe they—the many, so sure of themselves—were the ones who had lost the very definition of what it means to be human.
In their blindness, they believed that to be human meant only to survive, to win, to accumulate things.
But the madman knew that to be human means to seek, to never stop searching for oneself and for others...
The madman knew that at the core of humanity lies not the answer, but the question—and that too few dare to ask it anymore.
The crowd watched him, listened to him, but did not hear him...
The noise of the world was too loud, and his lantern too weak to illuminate anything within them.
They laughed, and yet he kept asking, for the madman knew:
You cannot find a human if you stop searching.
Based on a text of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman
Bogdan Alex Cristea
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The Silent tale
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