General: Space-time: now!

Message of the Day:

"Millions long for immortality but don't know what to do whith ours lifes on a rainy Sunday afternoon"

Susan Ertz

Again: Who is Susan Ertz? I don't know. I simply read the phrase in an old copy of a Reader's Digest magazine. But the phrase makes sense.

Where am I now? Or, what my reference in space-time at the time I writing this text to this blog?

The time is always the present time. My present moment now is a relatively cool dawn of 29 May 2004. In the measure that the present slides into the future and leave the past as a trail, this date will become increasingly older. My descendants living a thousand years from today are not even able to imagine how all which is commonplace today could have existed and occurred. But all existed and occurred.

Further, all exists now while I'm writing and is occurring in real time, while I'm typing each letter of this text. Yes, time is indeed relative.

And about the space? Where am I standing now, at this moment? What is my physical reference in the space?

I'm sitting in a comfortable black chair in front of my PC - a Pentium 266, something quite outdated for 2004, but which working still very efficient and reliable - with a headset, listening to a Frank Zappa's CD.

I'm using an old dark green shirt, black shorts, a watch and glasses in the face. In describing these things in this way, it seems the description of the material goods left behind by Gandhi when he died, and that turned  the world admired for his frugality and generosity. But it is not so simple.

I'm in my bedroom-office, a room of my house I use to keep my computer and my books.

My house is located in a relatively poor district in Goiânia, a city in Brazil. A set of combined new, but small houses, in a corner resulting from two narrow ugly streets, where dozens of children and adolescents play part of the day. One block down there is a group of houses in form as a small slum next to Meia Ponte River, the main river that runs through the city. It isn't a known neighborhood. In fact, it exists more as an appendix to larger and more structured neighborhoods, but because it is locate in a down part next to a river, it grew as a kind of marginalized area.

I live in Villa Monticelli already since one year and a half ago. It is close to the Agricultural Park, the place where occurs the famous annual agricultural fair in Goiânia, an event regarded by many people as the high point of the agricultural world in the State of Goiás, Brazil, and even one of the largest event in the Midwest Region and in Brazil. But, forgotten, so next to the park, stays Villa Monticelli, where I live and shelter myself dayly.

I have few friends at this stage of my life. Very few, for the sake of the truth. No more than five. Maybe one or two. None of them live in the Village Monticelli. Around my home, I know a dozen people, including a couple owner of the small grocery store where I make small purchases along the day. I believe that, in community terms, I am an illustrious stranger. A kind of ghost, seen by some people in the neighborhood with a certain frequency, but unknown as a ghost. I'm connected only physically with these people, I mean, we share the same neighborhood, but that's it all. My life spin around spheres others than the Community.

And where is my mind?

My body is on a chair, in a room full of books, in a simple house located on a corner of a overlooked neighborhood in a large city in Brazil, a large country on the Eastern side of Latin America, a continent, a large mass of firm land in the South region of the planet Earth, a planet that, well, in a thousand years ahead I hope they still knowing what is and where is located the Earth.

This brief description is a bit like the life of some people who lived in a distant past, whose biographies tell us that lived their lives even more common than the live we think we usually get in our day everyday. Many great men have lived simple lives, without luxe, without friends, without fame and without glory. No one power, and a recognition that only consolidated sometimes centuries after they died, and a recognition that they could not even contemplate, or maybe even desire, nor enjoy. Humankind has this strange behavior: it is relatively blind to the present, and in a way, aspires to a great future, but do not know what to do, in fact even don't know see, its great men in their rainy Sunday afternoons. We do not know what the future will reveal. Which of us alive today will be remembered in five thousand years?And for what reasons?

We can't know beforehand, but one thing seems certain: no one will be remembered for what he didn't, or because, he can or ought to be done, failed to do so, regardless for no reason by the history books, however convincing and persuasive it sounds. It would be very curious to read in any history book the name of some famous person who was famous for, may have been a great scientist and have invented the penicillin, not invented it because he could not have been a scientist, because his mother died when he was a young child and he had to adapt to the reality of his time being a humble farmer of lands, who died without having done nothing more that cultivate land. Even Jesus, being a humble carpenter, did not become famous in history for being a great carpenter.

Maybe one day we can, by a ingenious and unimaginable way, to rescue the memories of people who have gone before and know what they thought during every second of their lives. In this case, it is possible that humble strangers who did not were in the history books henceforth could come to be in it, by virtue of what we will learn about what they thought, but this knowledge is still far from being possible.

But this doesn't mean it is impossible.

In this case, would be good that we took better care of what we think. Although we are not put on pedestals and worshiped in the distant future, we may be execrated as large evils and villains. But I'm not talk serious about that possibility. The universe might be such that it will never allow it occurs, for good and for evil of our descendants, and our name. For good or evil of our own name, because this is all that is left of us, whether a lightning does not erase our latest information from a large database server in some department of government archives. So, we die for the third time...

My message of the day:

"No one will be remembered for what he didn't"

Rosenvaldo Simões de Souza