Time is a grand fiction that alters everything while leaving the truly fundamental unchanged. Our fears and joys remain rooted in early childhood; even in old age, we are little more than a repetition of what we learned to be. Days and nights pass, perhaps months governed by the moon, and seasons dictated by climatic regularity. Yet this artificial construct of calendar years grows harder to assimilate, detached as it is from Nature, serving only to renew that unoriginal hope for artificial discontinuities in the life we know.
Out of respect for the domestic audience, I too lend myself to a sparkling wine and a few optimistic toasts, given that pessimism has signed an exclusive contract with television pundits. In this phase of imaginary transitions, I prefer to return to the natural baseline, tuning in to the material realities of existence. I note that the earth has no declared age, and stones are as old or as young as the hands that pick them up or hurl them.
Nothing in Nature seems to heed the voices of wrath and astonishment propagating the end of the world. Our biography is so brief that we would be left speechless if the pebbles of Serra Tinta were to recount even a fraction of the histories they have witnessed. We may insist on changing the year, but we cannot alter the true measure of all dreams: continuous, unmeasurable time.
Paulo Fidalgo
CEO of Marketividade
