"O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time."

W. H. Hauden, "As i Walked Out One Evening", 1937

 

So, as we say, in this blog we gonna talk pretty much about History. And, to talk about history, it is necessary that we first talk about Time, or at least our concept of Time.

I was born and raised during the “Post-Ideological Era”, or, rather, after the end of the “Cold War Era”. In one of it’s most influencial books, “The End of History and the Last Man”, Francys Fukuyama theorized that, as the result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, only the West Block would have remained to influence the rest of the World.

And so, the End of History was decreed.

Matter of fact, we start living not only in a “Time without History” as Professor Timoty Snaider said, but in a “Time without Time”. A long, infinite, straight line that, no matter what, projects the present into Eternity. There were not only more problems of thinking about History, there were no more problem thinking about Time.

In my life as an academic, I spent so much hours talking and writing about this, and then: It Happened.

A sweep of wind, and all became Past.

A Past, perhaps, that not even became Future yet.

What this virus, called SARS-COVID-19, brought back to our lives, it is not only the concept of humanity tied to its Mortality, but also that of humanity tied to its Time. We asked ourselves many times if the problem was thinking little about the past, or little about the future. We were all wrong: the problem is that we didn’t think of the Present at all.

The “Lockdown”, or “Measures of Social distanciation”, stuck everything and everybody in a Perpetual Present, an anxyous waiting for something nearly to come: Freedom or Doom.

Now we all have to deal with it, every single day, every single minute. Impossible to know what will come, impossible to prevent it from happening.

There is only a question we need to ask ourselves: when will this present become the Past or the Future?

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