"Every past time was better" is not only one of those common places that put reasoning on hold, it is also and above all the condensation of the thousand and one ways that hope has to capitulate. If we could see ourselves from the outside, if we were, then, a being arrived from another galaxy, it would seem inherent to our species, that is, to the human being, that kind of surrender that is but the worst of our moral defeats and that does not respond but to our temporal perspective of death. Of course, it happens to each individual at a different time - it can reach us at an early age, in that increasingly long period that is our average age or in that other line that we know as old age.but there is no way to avoid the minute in the hour of the day when our own end looks us in the eye and we assume rotting flesh.
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I say this, about that unexpected and at the same time inevitable moment that usually takes us by surprise - at the funeral of a loved one, in a fit of anguish, in a well of hopelessness, but also at the height of joy, before the birth of a child, right after making love—, because it is from that minute of that hour that, in addition to assuming simple numbers on a tin, we begin to miss our past and not just remember it. Although perhaps strange is not the correct word, because to miss, we always miss - hence memory is a place to which we return again and again and again and hence remembering is the act to which our brain dedicates the most energy. and more time. The correct word would then be beautify. And the phrase should say: it is from that minute that,In addition to assuming that the clock we have looked at was always moving in the strictly opposite direction to what we believed, we began to embellish and, therefore, to oversize our past.
Yes, yes ... we all know that human beings are mortal and we have all lived with that idea since we were children. But knowing the destiny of our species is not the same as looking at one's own. It is not the same, then, to know that life is over than to know that the experience is over. It is right there, in that unexpected and at the same time inevitable moment in which we discover that our experience - in all its fullness and in all its power - is the one that will perish, that what is always perishing is embellished and oversized, because experience is embellished and oversized, not life; the memories, not the past.
Of course, although it might seem so, the problem is not that beautification or that oversize that, after all and however excessive they may be, are nothing but affirmative acts of will, vitality and personal experience, all that, then, that — naively, of course — we convince ourselves that it will be what we will leave behind. The problem is that many times, too many, in reality, encapsulation is added to the beautification and oversize, the petrification of one's own experience: it is then that all those people appear whose last and greatest aspiration is that of the insect in the amber, all those people who want their experience to be the last to shine in the sun.
It is those people who yearn to become a star museum piece who, without realizing it, have been morally defeated, who lost hope and who spits out that phrase that asserts “all past times were better”, through its thousand and one variants : "These doctors are not like those of my generation", "Wow, the engineers from before, those did know how to build", "if you knew how dresses were sewn when I was young", "no, no, no ... food Today is not worth shit "," for shoes, those who made with your last "," art, what is called real art, is not found in this century "," criticism, the only one, is dead and buried ”.
I bring this to mind because lately I have found even more statements from writers and writers - I do not know if it is that the pandemic multiplied the moments in which the temporal perspective of death is revealed - who assure that literature is finished, that it no longer has blood , which is empty, which lacks strength. They are the same phrases that I have heard a thousand and one times at literary festivals, book fairs, presentations, colloquia and other meetings around books, just before smiling and feeling sorry.
And this time I have no doubt: pity is the right word. Because that is what I feel before the writers trapped in amber, before those writers and writers whose only desire is to become the star piece of the museum, before those writers and writers of multiple ages - many of them and they even belong to my generation, that is, they were born in the late seventies — who have chosen to deny any experience other than their own. His and, of course, his, because, as a union, capitulation also works in the plural: the museum exposes everyone together, because after them there is and should not be anything. But I do not want to be confused what I say: I do not pity the common place, I do not pity what those who are only capable of looking back, denying not only the future but also the present.
I feel sorry for them, the morally defeated writers who have lost hope at the gates of their personal hell and who - although they always believe that they found the most ingenious of the thousand and one capitulation phrases - did nothing else. than to give up, narrowing, paradoxically, their experience.
And it is that you can only spit out a phrase such as "literature is over" or "literature no longer has blood" if you believe - if you seriously believe! - that literature is the same size as one or that one and his herd.
For all this I feel sorry for all this and because one can only believe that literature has an end, if one has stopped reading, if one does not read what came after him.
Dear Heralds of Amber, do yourselves a favor and read, before handing out Extreme Unions.
Read, for example, to those who have not yet given up, even if you have.
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