Synopsis
Like a pyrotechnic game that enchants and leaves you speechless, life lasts the time of a sensational explosion, then it ends. What remains, at the end of this exhilarating show, is the feeling that it was too short, the amazement, a bitter-sweet melancholy, the desire to start over, the fear that it is already too late. Through the fireworks metaphor, it is possible to represent the three most significant phases of human existence and the feelings which predominate over each of them.
Childhood is actually characterized by the taste of waiting that precedes the event, a pleasure which has yet to exist, but which is already more intense than the pleasure itself that will come. The life of a child follows the logic of the well-known admonition "hic et nunc", but in a far more naive and, perhaps, more genuine meaning. Children seize the moment in its essence, they don't worry about the consequences of their actions, nor do they think for a long time before making a choice. This rashness of theirs, daughter of immaturity, is perhaps what Horace aspires to, trying to live in the "here and now" despite adulthood. But childhood cannot be replicated even by the most brilliant poet and, with it, the enjoyable pleasure which lies within the preparation becomes impossible to get.
The pleasure no longer lies in waiting for the fires, but is the fire itself. Bright, deafening and bursting, it is the moment of maximum expression of the pyrotechnic game and of human life, the culmination of the show. During early adulthood everything revolves around love - love for oneself, love for another person, love for a project, love for an animal and so on - and love is pleasure itself too.
The search for love is exciting, its loss is exhausting, but human enjoyment dwells in lived and consumed love, the rest is a side dish which can enrich or impoverish. However, moderate love is a prerogative of wise people and wisdom is an achievement that affects another phase of life, the third. A young adult loves in a passionate way, and many times, and the feeling generates light and noise, but "violent joys get violent endings. They die in their triumph, like gunpowder and fire that are consumed in the first kiss". If Romeo and Juliet had been sixty-five or so, perhaps they would have loved each other in silence and in moderation, but they would have remained alive at least until the end of their fires.
Life is consumed slowly in old age, even the body slows down its march towards a goal which, in the end, belongs to everyone and that everyone would like avoiding, except the Stoics. The last shot in the sky marks the end of the games and the beginning of a nebulous darkness which lives on the reflection of a light of a life which has already been lived.
