Imagine that the sky, the vast expanse above, isn’t just something we see with our eyes, but something we all share in a deeply spiritual, almost ethereal way. This sky is not merely the physical space above us; it’s a realm where ideas float like clouds, drifting across souls, connecting the unseen, the untold, the unspoken.
In this cosmic plane, the landscape of creativity is universal. It’s not just yours, nor theirs, but ours, somehow. Every artist, every writer, every creator is flying through the same sky, navigating the same clouds of thought, as if we are all touching the same pulse of existence, but from different vantage points. The winds that carry our inspirations, our doubts, and our revelations are the same—they may blow in different directions, but they come from the same source.
Have you ever felt that strange sense of recognition when you stumble upon a piece of work—an image, a poem, a melody—that mirrors something you’ve been living, something you’ve been wrestling with in the hidden corners of your soul? It’s as if the artist or creator wasn’t just inspired by the same sky, but had actually been flying in the same air currents as you. Their landscape is the same as yours, yet seen through their own unique lens.
This is where it gets unsettling: the realization that we aren’t creating in isolation. We’re all tapping into something much bigger than ourselves, something collective. The ideas aren’t confined to our personal experiences—they’re echoes of a larger, universal force. We are not alone in this. As we reach into the depths of our creativity, we’re not merely picking up stray pieces of our own subconscious; we’re in direct conversation with other souls, other spirits, and other minds, all deciphering the same cosmic landscape in our own way.
What is this strange, spiritual web we’re all caught in? It’s like an unspoken pact between souls, an invisible network of shared perceptions, awaiting those brave enough to soar high enough to see the connections. And perhaps the most unsettling question is this: If these landscapes are so alike, if our minds are flying together through this shared sky, does the work we create ever truly belong to us? Or are we just co-authors of a far greater story—one that has no beginning, no end, only infinite possibilities and intersections?
And if our ideas are born from this collective flight, do we still have the power to claim them as our own, or are we merely vessels through which the landscape manifests itself? Do we all channel the same stuff?
The Invisible Library and the Ghosts Who Write in It
There exists a theory—half whispered, half dismissed—that all ideas already exist. Not in the crude, material sense, where they must be penned and printed to be real, but in a place both more ancient and more ephemeral. A sort of Invisible Library, where thoughts float like dust in a forgotten archive, waiting for someone—anyone—attuned enough to brush them off and bring them into the world.
This, of course, raises a deeply unsettling question: if an idea is there, waiting to be found, does it belong to the one who discovers it? Or is that person merely a clerk in a cosmic bureaucratic office, stamping papers and filing them under “human achievement”?
I have experienced this phenomenon firsthand.
It began in art school, where I, an earnest but terribly insecure student, drew something—something that I believed, with all my young, foolish heart, was uniquely mine. Until a classmate, who I had the courage to show my Sun’s shadow drawing series, freshly created, glanced over, raised an eyebrow, and said, with a tone that directly suggested fowl play, “Oh. You draw like Dan Perjovschi.”
At that moment, time fractured. Who was Dan Perjovschi? Had I heard this name in a fever dream? Had he and I once met in some foggy astral plane, sketching the same lines in the same ghostly ink? More likely, I had simply tapped into a pre-existing current—one he had reached before me, or perhaps at the exact same time, in some cruel simultaneity of fate.
Years later, I had the courage to message Perjovschi himself and tell him all about this moment that became my first and last time coming out with the very personal drawings, because I somehow found the same visual style as him to express my ideas in. He, graciously, took his time to go through my drawings and concluded that although the single-line drawing style may seem similar, our concepts are completely different and our creations can coexist. His approach was socio-political satirical, mine was trying to describe an interior emotional and existential, philosophical landscape.
There was no great revelation, no mystical confirmation that we were, indeed, part of something larger. He was simply there, and I was there, and the question remained suspended, unanswered: Were we both borrowing from the same spectral archive, stylistically?
The suspicion deepened, recently, when I stumbled upon a local writer, last week, when listening to a local TV series, “Piper pe limbă”, a local show that invites local cultural personalities, artists, writers, film makers, etc, to talk about their latest publications or art exhibition in the local art galleries. I was looking for the latest interview with my former Art History teacher I had the honor to have at University, but since it didn’t get published on their YouTube channel yet, I started browsing through old episodes, too see what else was going on in my home town I recently moved back in, after my divorce in 2021. I love writing, so I started listening to the interview that the host, Robert Șerban had in his studio, of Iulian Tănase, a man tormented by the absurdity of existence (as all good writers are), that is also teaching creative writing, who just published a new book, a fiction novel. He had written about a stand-up comedian—one haunted, paralyzed by his own voice. A fictional character who started to speak through the echoes of literary ghosts, as a means of bypassing his fear of public speaking, and so he started channeling the lives of some of the great writers, romanian or universal, as part of his imaginary Stage Fright Club. And it was then that I felt a slow, creeping chill.
Because I, too, had written something eerily similar. A series of poems about manifesting, that manifest when read, in different voices of different great cultural personalities, like Umberto Eco, David Lynch, Haruki Murakami, etc. A completely separate idea, yet an idea that pulsed with the same dark heartbeat.
And the standup part is a recent revelation I woke up one morning with, at the beginning of this year, that I could use a funny, ranting tone approach to present ideas on mental health issues I was working on in my own inner healing journey investigations, a stylistic form that would allow me to publish my so called “rants” so others could maybe relate and find personal value in them also.
I stood there, staring at this book that was not mine but could have been. The realization settled in: We had both pulled from the same well. We had both pressed our ears to the same invisible wall, somehow.
And here is the most terrifying, the most beautiful part: this is not an isolated phenomenon. It happens again and again, across time and space. I hesitate on an idea, and it materializes elsewhere. A joke I conceive but do not tell appears in a Netflix special months later. A phrase I almost wrote is whispered back at me from a book I have never read. The longer I live, the more it becomes clear:
Ideas are not owned. They are borrowed. And if you wait too long, they will leave you for someone who listens.
So what does one do with such knowledge? How does one exist, knowing that every unwritten novel, every unspoken poem, every ignored stroke of genius may be drifting away even now, slipping through time to find another willing host?
The answer, of course, is painfully simple. You write. You speak. You create.
Or you don’t. And you live forever haunted by the ghosts of all the things that could have been yours.
The space where familiar ideas that feel very, very personal, is, actually, very crowded.
Should I also form a Club? First person on this list would, undoubtedly be Iulian Tănase.
This experience settles within me, a quiet certainty—that nothing is ever truly new. Every sound we utter, each movement we make, is not ours alone. With every letter we release—spoken or written—there is another, at this very moment, echoing the same. All of existence hums in unison, a vast, invisible choir.
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