There is no unanimity about the origin of that form of tribute that we know as a minute of silence. Some place it in Portugal in 1912, when the Senate was silent for ten minutes in honor of a deceased Brazilian minister. Other sources interpret that the precursors were the Americans who, in the same year, used this expression of respect to honor the victims of the Titanic, although an Australian journalist and a South African politician also opt for this historical recognition.
The formula has been adapted to each era. From those 10 minutes that must have taken forever in Lisbon, we have now reached 30 seconds of football, often marred by the shouts of hooligans.
What has not changed is the essence: it is about stopping the world for a minute to reflect without interference on what has brought us to the funeral home or to the act of homage. In doing so, in addition, everything that does not have to do with the deceased is being silenced, so during that minute only the victim speaks. That is why the interruptions of the minutes of silence are particularly cruel, such as the one that occurred yesterday during the memory of the 17-A attack. They are cruel and exploitive, because those who shout, in reality, silence with their shouts the voice of those who can no longer express themselves: the absent.
Those who acted in this way were a few dozen people who did not represent anyone, but who probably would not have gone to the Rambla if sectors of the independence movement had not heated up the atmosphere during these five years pointing out, without a solid basis, the black hand of the State behind of the attacks. The fact that the president of Junts, Laura Borràs, spoke with the protesters ended up making the ceremony rarer. Her party clearly distanced itself after the boycott of the act.
The Norwegian explorer and publisher Erling Kagge, in his splendid essay Silence in the Age of Noise (Taurus), analyzes the virtue of musical pause in Beethoven, John Cage or Miles Davies. Of the famous silences of the latter, he says that the notes that he had decided not to play had more meaning than those that did sound. Hopefully on future anniversaries you can hear those notes that are the message of the victims.
