A person looks into the mirror and notices another wrinkle or a forest of gray hairs spreading across the crown. They acknowledge with quiet resolve that the elixir of eternal youth does not exist and that the only viable path is to learn how to age gracefully. What does that mean exactly? The hope is not a secret formula but a practical approach: to fend off age-related illnesses together, to maintain a level of physical and mental health that allows for resilient adaptation to adversity with dignity, and to preserve a degree of independence for as long as possible. Alongside this, there is a desire to stay connected to a personal history and to find harmony in the lines on the skin and the traces of time, as if they mark the journey of a life.
That sense of coherence is what the narrator misses when seeing figures who were once central to a historical left in this country—figures like Felipe González and Fernando Savater, among many others—adopting a more rightward, neoliberal stance. These leaders open the pages of newspapers and lend their voices to attacks on the policies of the party they once supported, or voted for. It is striking that those who wielded so much power also broke with their predecessors to reach it, even altering the premises that sustained them, such as abandoning Marxism at the PSOE’s extraordinary congress of 1979. If they proposed such a dramatic shift, why not accept that a younger generation can make new changes for a different society? The question arises: is this shift a form of aging that, like scoliosis, subtly bends the spine toward the right, or is it the thinning skin of aging revealing bones that were always there beneath the surface? Is it the result of resisting the passage of time, fearing that without their voice they will be deemed irrelevant? It seems as though they ignore what Pascal Bruckner argues in his essay on aging: “A good teacher must accept his own disappearance once his work is finished.”
On the contrary, they present an apocalyptic discourse against successors who do not follow the path they laid out. In their critique, they are willing to align with an ideological rival: a right that grows ever more aggressive. Meanwhile, those who once stood inside the left look on in puzzlement at the dangerous curve they are entering. Even if there are meaningful reasons behind the shift, the tone of their rhetoric—full of anger, resentment, and grievance—adds a sense of the old and the outdated. What is sad is that, in winds of rising intolerance and widening gaps between rich and poor, those who helped build the country could still lend a hand. Yet it is clear that not all can be counted on, because some, rather than offering a hand, grip a club to threaten those they see as dissidents.
So the narrator returns to the mirror, brushes aside the wrinkles and gray strands, and wonders whether the eyes still retain curiosity, whether they can look around without seeking blame, exclusion, or provocation. Are they capable of letting go of resentment and, above all, of accepting that they may eventually disappear and become irrelevant?
Notes from the past linger: Pascal Brucker, Un instante eterno. Filosofía de la longevidad, Siruela, 2021.