Yesterday was the shortest day of the year with its nine hours of light and the still sun. The ancients celebrated the winter solstice as a great event, invoking the star king with wishes of renewal. We citizens of the 21st century are too busy closing the year, even if we are not accountants. They are all summaries to squeeze and blend those 365 days, which is why we are somewhat fed up with the rankings made by experts –an increasingly embarrassing word– that rate characters, books, wines, cars or musicians. And I think about how the last one on the list will feel, wouldn't he have preferred that they forget about him?
The hours seem wrapped in cellophane, decorated with garlands and holly branches. Jets of lighting embrace the cities to support them in their fantasy, even if they do not allow us to see the stars. The market assumes the mandate of entertainment and encourages the passerby to feel that joy is an obligation. Fortune, at your fingertips. Today, the god of money distributes luck in the lottery. But, what about those whose lives were turned upside down by getting rich from one day to the next? Certificates of happiness do not exist; instead, we catch it unexpectedly when a ray of sunlight blinds us and reality shakes half magically, just like those Christmas balls with white and gold artificial snow.
I read I Live at the End of the World, by the poet Saeed Jones, one of the most applauded books of 2022. It begins like this: “In the United States a gathering of people / is called target practice or a funeral, / depending on who lives long enough / to define the terms. But for now, / we are alive at the end of the world, / shocked by the headlines and alarms, / burning the little love / that we have left. It's not just North America that feels like the world is reeling as the rampant use of fentanyl increases. The optimists would like to numb themselves until the psychopathic oligarchs disappear and the war ends.
World disorder has stirred the awareness that something is running out. The dying ecosystem, choked by high ambition, has no turning back. And, in the small life, a stain of loneliness spreads, and there is no spray that removes the fence. But we are alive, even though the trumpets announce the death of a world that has become old despite continuing to idealize it. Perhaps our luck is not that of the hype, but we will be fools to bow our heads before the messengers of the apocalypse. To burn the love and life that we have left.
