Delicacy, the thread of civility.

Delicacy establishes a coexisting platform that separates the living world, roughly, into two portions – one belonging to the rude people and another to the educated.

Rude people are the course, the ignorant, and the uncouth. They confuse strength with rudeness and bad manners. They cross other people’s path - physically or symbolically. They invade places uninvited; they meddle in other people's lives. Rude people are clueless.

The educated are the cultured, the civilized, and the true thinkers. The educated are those who, in any event, can keep their unalterable sweetness, as if they were beings who did not mingle with the unpleasant earthly affairs. The educated are the delicate people.

Being delicate is almost an anachronism, a stubborn recollection from the past. It is a virtually unrecognizable feature these days. Most people do not even know what delicacy means, and confuse it with femininity. But delicacy is a trait of the soul; it is a refinement of education. Delicacy is gentleness, care, elegance, refinement, perfection, courtesy, kindness. Delicacy is also frailty - a characteristic of fine porcelains, tasteful crystals, and of the sensitive and beautiful things.

Being delicate can be as sharp as a sword! Being delicate imposes itself naturally, without noise: there’s no need to raise your voice, wrangle, gesture wildly or make a scandal. Delicacy overrides everything – it creates its own space. It subjugates people. It smashes the brute – people with no education and a crude spirit.

We can tell that the world has been invaded by a race of rude people, who are leading humankind back to the caves. In an era where technology could elevate humankind, make it better, more cultured and educated - because information is a single click away - there comes a way back to barbarism, but not a barbarism of survival, dominated by hunting and combating the dangers of wild nature. It is a worse kind of barbarism – it’s the barbarism of the soul! We are dealing with the exchange of excellence for mediocrity, brutality for civility, of education for lack of good manners.

We must get delicacy back: make relationships elegant, refine the spirit, and redeem the soul. Delicacy is a kind of code with subtle rules that are almost imperceptible when they are applied, but they become glaring when they are not carried out. For most mortals these rules mean nothing, but they should mean something: without them we are in the domain of the shadows, in the realm of the brute.

Delicacy reveals a world of small silences, where one does not speak too much to be able to listen to the other; where one is aware of the signs and gestures to establish an elegant language where you don’t have to say everything; where one does not speak ill of other people's lives nor exposes the privacy of personal life; where one dresses soberly without exposing the intimacies of the body; where one is not late for appointments; where one reads good books to enrich the spirit and not to show publicly; where one does not numerate the benefits - not who you know nor what you do.

Delicacy is the endless world of discretion, and is in the delicacy that the strength lies - when a word is sharper than a cry and civility outweighs barbarism.