Nam et ego peregrinus, errans per orbem, viator
sum (I)
Antonis Nikolis’s Peregrinus revealed itself to me like a flame
transforming the air around it: a narrative that does not merely recreate a man
of late antiquity, but lays bare the way in which the human being, of any age, struggles
with the fluidity of the self. Nikolis’s prose moves between detail and pause,
between psychic eruption and lucid detachment, creating a rhythm that resembles
breath in crisis, panting, asthmatic, existential.
Peregrinus, the man of continual metamorphoses, strikes me as one of our
contemporaries. He is not merely the “traveller” of the Roman world; he is an
exemplary figure of the fractured subject. He changes names, ideas,
communities, and ideals, not out of frivolity, but out of an incurable need to
reach a self that constantly eludes him. In his unstable identity I recognise a
reflection of the modern individual: the person attempting to remain upright
amid floods of information, social roles, digital projections, and ideological
demands.
Beneath his successive forms lies a trauma, the wound of the father,
rejection, the shadow of patricide, that resembles a crack in a ceramic vessel:
whatever is built around it will always strain, split, and threaten collapse.
The text made visible to me how this wound functions not only as a biographical
burden but as a mechanism of the narrative itself: a descent into the origin of
identity, where every human being encounters his or her own limits. In the
contemporary world, where psychology has become part of our shared vocabulary,
this inner injury no longer feels ancient; it feels intimate, almost everyday.
The narrative follows the pulses of this instability: internal
focalisations that melt time and external observations that arrest events in a
crystalline objectivity. Nikolis moves with chilling precision from the flow of
consciousness to the gaze of the historical observer. Through this ambiguity,
the hero is revealed as a being who belongs nowhere, neither fully to his own
age nor to ours, and yet who can stand as a common matrix of human
disorientation.
As Peregrinus travels, the novel gradually transforms him into a mirror of
the world around him: an empire in ideological exhaustion, a multitude of
teachings promising redemption, a continuous struggle between inherited
tradition and emergent meanings. There is something strikingly contemporary in
this image: a man moving among religions, philosophies, and political ideas in
search of a narrative within which he might find a place, just as modern man
wanders among identities that shift with the velocity of the age.
In the end, the act of self-immolation does not function as the staged
conclusion of an ancient life, but as the symbol of an existential explosion
that may concern us even more today than it did then. Its Lacanian reading as
an attempt to exceed the symbolic order, its Sartrean dimension as an act of
radical self-creation, its existential intensity as a refusal of every
construction imposed by the Other upon the self, all these converge in a moment
that surpasses both heroism and tragedy and becomes an image of the human need
for meaning within a world constituted by reflections.
The modern shudder arises from the recognition that this flame, the flame
of Peregrinus, is no longer merely historical. It is the flame that burns when
the individual tries to acquire an identity within a world that changes shape
even faster than the hero himself. It is the flame of the desire for freedom,
but also the flame of the need to be seen, to be remembered, to exist through
the gaze of others, a desire that, in the age of public exposure, has become
more intense than ever.
Peregrinus thus
becomes a profoundly contemporary text not because it speaks directly about our
own age, but because it speaks about the human condition when that condition
enters crisis. Fluid identity, the fragmentation of experience, the search for
meaning through narrative, the persistent need for recognition, the anxiety of
belated self-consciousness, all these are structural elements of our own era as
well. That is why Peregrinus’s journey continues to move us: because through
his ashes we glimpse not the end of an ancient man, but the perpetual beginning
of the modern self.
