The Limited Times

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2020-07-13T11:48:49.316Z


The pandemic has plunged us into impatience to have no limits ahead. Without a limit indicating the future, it is almost impossible to live in the present


When I was a child I spent two months hospitalized in a hospital in my city. The first days I spent unconscious. But when I woke up from the high fever, when I was able to sit up for the first time in bed, I began to ask, every morning, every evening, and every night, when I could go home. With the roof of the hospital room as the only landscape, time did not pass. No one ventured to tell me that the doctors did not know when I was going to stop looking at that white ceiling, illuminated from behind my bed by a window that I could not access, but whose light woke up desires that were impossible to fulfill. The light stoked the memory of everything I had lost since a truck left me lying on the street, with my pretty light blue dress dirty with blood.

They brought me books and games, which were piled on the light table. An addicted reader since childhood, I was not interested in books because I sensed that no one would interrupt reading. In the outer life, the one that had elapsed in time, I read with the greed of a hungry cat in front of a bird, because I thought that someone was going to enter my room and demand that I get up or turn off the lamp, or that I I would dedicate to something else because reading all day I was going to be blind.

When he read with the time measured by others, reading was a race where the minutes and hours were played. But lying in the hospital bed, with no certain perspective of when I would leave there, I could read what I wanted. And naturally I was bored of reading.

Without limit, what appears is tedium, which is precisely not the imposition of deadlines, but the absence of any measure of time. I learned it from a very young age and of course I did not draw any conclusions. Half a century later, I realize the same thing happens with the unlimited time quarantined, the 24 hours that threaten to be the same as the previous 24 and the 24 that will follow.

Broch said, a lot of years ago, that poetry is the impatience of knowledge. Quote phrase like few, today leaves me thinking, when the quarantines caused as a wall to the pandemic have migrated from Europe to Latin America. If Broch was right, poets will flourish. Do not rush, because the most beautiful phrases are not always exact predictions. Locked in our houses, we wait for the future time with the impatience to know it. Not for that, unfortunately, we became poets. Rather, we become hungry animals, who, with each passing hour, feel that they will not be able to wait any longer before biting into a piece of fresh meat.

We are time. And time was stolen from us for infinity. It will be said that I exaggerate. However, I am convinced that any absence of limits is the true image of infinity. We learn that a long time does not mean anything if it is not confronted with a measure that requires its duration. Bergson has already said: time is duration in our consciousness.

What we are not in a position to suppose today is the hypothetical measure of that duration. The European experience, which went through the pandemic months before us, could convince us that this duration has a measure. However, time passes only when we experience it, not when we compare it with the experience of others. Therefore, a duration governed by circumstances that are not within human reach is potentially infinite, although everything shows that in other places that duration found its measure.

We are discovering very elementary things that we did not know. Having all the time ahead is like having nothing. Our experience of time was always limited by a final idea. Without that cairn, we are facing a form of infinity. Accustomed to measuring time by working or leisure hours, having all the time at our disposal is a kind of psychological torture, not that gift that previously seemed unattainable to us. We are nailed to infinity.

Fortunately, the Spanish have once again had those time limits, which the pandemic had stolen from them. It's curious. We never thought that we would envy limits. On the contrary, we get used to thinking that the enviable is infinity. The pandemic has plunged us into impatience to have no limits ahead. Without a time limit indicating the future, it is almost impossible to live in the present. And we took refuge, with nostalgia, in the happy time before the plague, where we fought against the limits that time imposed on us.

I return to the girl I was, sleepy from the painkillers, in a hospital bed. Only when a doctor told me that, the following month, I could get up and try the first steps, the time returned to what I knew, with dates, working days and rest, the course of something that went yesterday to something that will be tomorrow . And I didn't mind that there were still weeks to go before I could try those first steps, because I had a date to hang on to. I was no longer drowning in the impatience of knowledge.

Source: elparis

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