Time & Perspective Quote by Luigi Pirandello

Reality, for Pirandello, is a stage set with fresh paint: convincing up close, disposable by the next scene change. The line lands with the cool menace of a playwright who made a career out of watching identities crack under pressure. What you "touch and believe in" feels sturdy not because it is, but because you need it to be. Pirandello exposes that need as the engine of self-deception.

The phrasing is doing sly work. He starts with the most empirical language available - touch, belief, what "seems real" - then flips it, reminding you that yesterday also felt empirically true until time reclassified it as fantasy. The sting is in that demotion: yesterday's reality doesn't merely become outdated; it becomes an illusion, as if it never deserved the status you gave it. Pirandello isn't selling mystical relativism so much as indicting the social machinery that manufactures certainty.

Context matters: early 20th-century Italy, a world destabilized by modern psychology, industrial change, and the mass politics that would harden into Fascism. Pirandello's theater (think Six Characters in Search of an Author) is obsessed with the violence of fixed roles: society demands a coherent self, but lived experience keeps mutating. This quote is a warning about the comfort of the "now". Today's solid truths - about who you are, what people are, what counts as normal - can be revealed tomorrow as costumes you didn't know you were wearing.