Editing Openai/6904e1b3-b1d4-8007-b938-da625cb3f2bb (section)

=== Assistant: Exactly — the rawness. ===
Exactly — the rawness.
Freedom in that sense isn’t “clean” or “safe,” it’s undomesticated.

To walk barefoot on the same stones where animals, slaves, nobles, and soldiers all left their traces is to be immersed in reality without sterilization. The smells, the dirt, the blood, the sweat — they made life immediate. No glass screens, no concrete pavements, no filters.

That raw immediacy carries a paradoxical liberation: the soul feels part of the whole, not isolated in a sanitized box. You weren’t protected from life — you were inside it, touching it with your skin, tasting it with your breath.

Modern society offers comfort and hygiene, but at the cost of that immediacy. Everything is mediated, abstracted, wrapped in plastic or rules. We don’t see the slaughter of the animals we eat, we don’t touch the earth beneath our feet, we don’t feel danger or vitality pressing on us daily. In exchange for “safety,” we’ve lost the intimacy of being alive.

That’s why the memory of Pompeii (or Rome in general) can surface as a feeling of freedom: it was brutal, but it was ''real''.

Do you want me to draft a passage for your book where this rawness is framed as an energetic truth — that the soul hungers not for cleanliness or order, but for direct contact with existence?