“We will see the water rise and the earth crumble beneath it.”
“There will be dark moments until new times arrive.”
“The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in this chiaroscuro, monsters emerge.”
Citations, roughly aligned with Nostradamus, Foster Wallace, Gramsci, may strike us as clairvoyant or prophetic, perfectly suited to social media and virality; yet history repeatedly feeds the sense that chaos and catastrophe are here to stay, that the end is near.
There have been endings so many times that, much as Quino’s Mafalda suggested, it is merely the “continuation of the beginning” passed down by earlier generations.
The ghost of the Ukraine war, now outdated in memory, is replaced by the ghost of a perpetual conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. War seems to be ongoing or ominously looming. Peace is not a stable state but an ideal, a fleeting accident, though we only notice its fragility when a nearby dispute touches us. Yet on this planet, conflict, hunger, and displacement have been daily meals for centuries, affecting hundreds of thousands of lives.
In this country, fragmentation appears intractable. But looking back, people have always clashed like a grand duel on a canvas by Goya. The two Spains, sometimes three or four, have existed for ages in a place that never fully becomes what it should be, where generations argued over belonging to one empire or another and often found no easy way out.
Everything is older than the Earth itself, especially the things we claim to have invented yesterday, the things we defend with teeth bared as if they were ours alone.
The mass exodus of people leaving their homes and arriving at our shores — our shores — is overwhelming. It presses a question: have we forgotten that we once arrived at other ports as beggars? Then also invaders in the eyes of the locals, perhaps, yet driven by nothing more than the will to survive.
At any moment we fear the heavens or the hells will crack open and swallow us through a fissure. The seven seals could break, the seven trumpets might sound, and the seven last plagues begin: painful sores on the wicked, the seas and rivers drying, a deadly sun, the hardships of armies marching to Armageddon, a devastating earthquake, and hail. And yet, for years, this mayhem has been part of daily life, ordinary in its own way.
These are not good times, indeed. Inequality grows, the world’s wealth pools away from the poor, climate change is ignored by those who could act, and denial persists from those who either choose to or cannot see the obvious truth.
Without overemphasizing the severity, there is a sense that the current surge of disarray, absurdity, dread, and fear will eventually subside. For action to be effective, there must be spaces for reflection, for rationality, for counting to three, perhaps for revisiting the classics and letting them recalibrate the mind.
Maybe it only seems like the world ends each day. Yet this world has shown remarkable resilience against the folly of those who inhabit it.
That is its luck, in a way.