"NO HAY TIEMPO"

time and memory

 

Time and memory: two aspects of life that we cannot ignore. People always say "I must not waste time", "I must remember it" because we all know how powerful they are in our lives. Memory revolutionizes life, in fact, we can use it to build up realities, scenarios, experiences and to help the new generations to be aware of the mistakes done in the past and to encourage them to build a better world.

Memory is the key of pleasure: William Wordsworth, during the last decades of the 18th century, created a poetic device called "recollection in tranquility", a revolutionary method that changed forever the way of doing literature and it established a new approach to writing but also to reading. Memory helps the poet to write down on verses his experience, to remember the feeling linked to his past experience, to relive the pleasure of that particular moment . So the readers have the opportunity to identify/empathize with the poet's feelings so that they can also ,in a some way, live that moment by reading the poem itself.

We understand that memory, for example, can help men to get through terrible times because if they decide to lean upon their past happy moments or if they choose to read a book that contains memories of other people, it is possible that they can learn to enjoy and appreciate life more.

What is history without memories? Recently I've been listening to a song "Memoria" by a band called "Erreway" that explains very well not only the importance of memory as regards the reconstruction of historical events but also how difficult it can be to do it without any evidence or proof that can support the reliability of history, of people's memories, those who have witnessed and survived moments that are crucial to our history. Nowadays people seem to forget the importance of memories, in fact, they are so unaware of it that they try to deny untouchable events of our history, with the result that humanity is constantly endangered, encouraged to repeat mistakes that could cause its end.

So it is very important to underline the effort of all of those writers that have devoted time and work in order to leave to future generations facts that can help them to understand their existence better, and maybe, to improve their standards of life.

Some clear examples of people who decided to write songs, ballads, poems, novels, and so on, to help us to do a better job are The War Poets, George Orwell and Salman Rushdie. They all have in common one particular thing, in fact, they all pursue the goal of making their readers aware of something: for example, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, both addressed their works to the future generations. While R. Brooke with his poem "The Soldier" wanted to encourage the future English people to see war and death as the noblest acts you can do for your motherland, W. Owen wanted to destroy the myth of "Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori", focusing on the horrors of war because he wanted to convey that this is never the right choice. Even If they represent opposite sides and points of view, their works are equally important to understand what was happening at the time.

Through history now we know that Rupert Brooke didn't really experience war, because he died very young, so we can understand his point of view. Wilfred Owen really knew what he was talking about: he saw bombings, he felt fear and anger, he died in war. He believed that poetry had to be truthful because the only thing that a poet could do at the time was warn the future generations and make his contemporaries aware of the atrocities the war was causing. He remained faithful to his beliefs giving us all the reasons to escape from choosing war and more than anything choosing freedom and we should be grateful for that.

George Orwell and Salman Rushdie not only share the same literary ambitions, but they are fellow countrymen, in fact they were both born in India. Their lives and, of course, their works have been deeply marked by their choices.

Orwell's novels had two tasks: he wanted to convey the misery of the human fraternity caused by poverty and oppression, something that he had experienced himself, living during a short period of time in the most powerful nations of the time (London and Paris) in terrible conditions.

He lived in a time when Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Franco ruled Europe and he saw with his own eyes what could happen if we let totalitarian regimes rule us again.

In fact, in his masterpiece, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" he portrays a nightmarish future, a world without freedom and privacy, in which the leader "Big Brother" is always there controlling and suppressing his people, he describes a world in which feelings and memories aren't allowed to exist, only to help his readers not to repeat the mistakes of the past. The protagonist (Winston Smith) knows the importance of memory in such an oppressed and fake world, so even if he isn't allowed to do it, even if he works for the Ministry of Truth, that has the task of brainwashing people by changing their past constantly, he decides to buy a journal in which he'll write his experience, hoping that someone in a better future will read it and learn from it. Even so, Winston Smith is not a hero because, at the end, he'll be tortured and brainwashed, he'll lose his will, he'll give up his identity, he'll love the Party and Big Brother. This novel ends without consolation but it shows what could happen If we repeat the mistakes of our ancestors.

In 1983 Salman Rushdie wrote a novel called "Shame". In the interlude of the novel, he focuses on the best and worst aspects of migration. He comes to the negative conclusion that the worst thing that can happen to people is to be unstuck from more than a land, it's to be forgotten, to disappear "from history, from memory, from time".

Just as memory, Time has always been a fundamental element of our existence. During these months I had the opportunity to think about a lot of things and suddenly past, present and future became one. This pandemic was to me, as James Joyce would say, an "epiphany", a sudden revelation of my situation. I realised that It is very important to always remember our roots because only if we are conscious of the past, we'll live fully the present. If before I was worried about the future, I was scared of it, now I'm patiently waiting for it.