WELCOME TO TIME ISSUE NO.03

Credits

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Without listing more or less famous names and theories, suffice it to say that most of the greatest minds in human history have thought about time, with more or less brilliant or convincing results.

 

What is certain is that what we call time, as well as the subject of the last issue and the subject of the next one (which will conclude a kind of structural trilogy), represents one of the fundamental components of human existence.

 

In the Confessions, Saint Augustine writes about time, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know,” a feeling that I believe is shared by many of us.

 

Personally, I consider time to be one of those concepts greater than myself, capable of making me lose myself in a series of questions whose lack of answers makes me feel infinitely small and equally human, in a way that few of the other mysteries that God has sprinkled here and there in his great hallucinogenic genesis are capable of doing.

But the first thing that instinctively comes to mind when I think about time is the line from a 1998 Placebo song, Every You, Every Me, which goes: “All alone in space and time, there’s nothing here but what’s here’s mine.” The second one, on the other hand, is the title of another song, Time for Heroes, and finally, before I start thinking rationally about it, I think of the lines from a Baustelle song, Le Rane, in which Francesco Bianconi sings: “The last time I saw you changed, you were drinking a bitter at the bar, because time slips away, but the sign of time remains.”

 

When I tried to write this editorial, at the end, I thought that without referencing Henri Bergson, Kant, Zygmun Bauman, Leibniz or even Einstein, one could easily read in the simplicity and instinctive purity of this triptych of memories, a sense capable of validly painting a part of the human arc of experience in relation to this element.

 

There is a time, then, when, aided by the inalienable singularity of the Ego, we sometimes find ourselves alone as dogs at the center of a universe in which each of us, willingly or unwillingly, is our own focal point.

 

Beyond that, there is a time, difficult, I might add, when we can choose what to do with our time, when we can choose whether to become heroes or extras in our own story.

 

And, finally, there is the moment when you realize that time is passing and there is nothing you can do about it except try to enjoy it in some way.

 

In my humble opinion, you will find some of the most interesting minds of the 21st century tackling this theme in this issue of STXDYOZ, ergo I will not elaborate any further and let them inspire you.

The only thing I would like to add is a quote from another song, this time by the Strokes – You Only Live Once – which, besides being a beautiful song, has a title that makes a good point about how we should all weigh our time on this earth.

This editorial is therefore intended to be a call for introspection, free from social judgment, even libertarian judgment, which, sometimes, to this day, takes on an almost antinomian, authoritarian value.

 

 

Do you like your job?

 

Do you like going out in the evening for a drink?

 

Or do you prefer to watch the night and its lights from your window?

 

Do you want children?

 

A family?

 

Or dream in the bars of Cartagena?

 

Do you want to travel or spend Sundays in Italian stadiums?

 

Or listen to Mass on the radio?

 

Do you prefer making love or going to raves?

 

Do you like Tom Verlaine records?

 

Or do you prefer neoliberal prophets?

 

Do you want to read about whores or the Baroque?

 

It doesn’t matter if you like to sleep late, get up early, or smoke in train toilets.

 

 

There is no right or wrong, relativism is perhaps the only Creed, and the dogmas of our days will melt again and again like snow in the sun; the only certainty is our perception, and it is by following it that we should decide how to spend our time. For there is nothing, nothing truer and simpler than the fact that you only live once, and realising this, as Confucius said, is important.