Reflections on “Time”

Suddenly the people were living forever and the sense of life was lost. There were no reasons to work, to maintain social boundaries, to understand the value of time. Is it death what moves our societies? The question is quite interesting. I was sitting in the Spinnerei, an old cotton factory located in Leipzig that today is a contemporary artistic workshop. On the stage, when the characters discover that they do not have to die, they have an exuberant reaction that slowly become in an apathetic existence. The play was called “Politik der Unsterblichen” and it was, officially, my first theater play “auf Deutsch”. On my way home, I thought about it: What if we could choose not to die? What if we have “all the time”?

During the last three weeks I have not updated my blog. The time, in reality, flows. Sometimes, when we are expecting for something or someone, every second is an eternity. You could calculate the effort of the hands in the clock. They do not want to me. They doubt. In other scenarios, time is worthy: You have to learn German, to prepare the documents for your University, to enjoy the three months of summer, to celebrate your birthday, to buy food, to sleep, to wake up on time, to take the S-Bahn at the right time…

In my effort to learn as-much-as-possible, I listen the radio every day. I read the newspapers. On my last travel to Berlin, I read in Der Spiegel, an article about young prostitution in Amsterdam. A mother has lost her daughter and she has visited whorehouses in order to find her. What does represent “time” for her? What does represent “time” for humanity when we think about Gulf of Mexico and British Petroleum? The news talk about it every day: The environmental catastrophe is an open-chapter. Do we have time to stop it? What about climate change? Time, therefore, is the essential element where our personal and collective challenges and dramas occur.

It is complicated to take care of you and to try to change the world in which we live. I have had a meeting with my partners and my professor in the Lateinamerika Institut, at the Freie Universität Berlin. I am going to start my doctoral studies in three months and all the researches they are doing right now are just amazing: Prostitution in Mexico, racism and exclusion of Black or Indigenous populations in Ecuador, Mexico or Brasil, family disintegration and migration to the United States. Is science neutral? Could science be blind to the issues of our societies today? Do we have time to delay solutions?

The theater play described “a reality” that is impossible. We die in real life and time is the most limited resource. The current political and economical order that is responsible for many of  our cathastrophes has been resumed by the Nobel Prize writer Harold Pinter. In his words: “To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.” Maybe art and science are the weapons that could destroy the tapestry of lies. The times are changing. I think we all deserve a decent life.