—I need to completely redo the preliminary report, because the first one no longer seems intellectually honest to me.
That phrase provoked a heavy silence. It wasn't a religious triumph, but rather a cautious respect for a process that had become enormously complicated.
I returned home that night, and my wife, Juliana, knew something was wrong the moment she saw me; I had lost all color. Over the next few weeks, I rewrote the report several times. I fought against two opposing temptations: to suggest more than could be proven out of sheer fascination, and to force weak explanations simply to protect the mental model that had sustained me all my life. In the end, I signed a document far more cautious than the devotees would have liked, and far more unsettling than I myself would have preferred.
A New Man Facing the Limit.
The case was filed in Rome with the usual discretion, and I tried to return to my civilian life as if the subsoil of Assisi didn't exist. I couldn't. Something had died in me that January: my old comfort, the arrogant conviction that every anomaly would eventually conform to my favorite scientific categories.
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