Time is a tyrant, don’t waste it!

Exactly two minutes before the official start, Mario Monti recites the opening speech of the 76th edition of the Fiera del Levante. The peculiarity of the ceremony leads us to reflect.

Have you ever wished you could exercise control over the time? Think about it, it’s possible and we already do it. And I’m not referring to the photograph or the cinema that allow us to travel back and forward in time evoking memories and scenarios of other times. I point the finger at the way we deal with everyday situations. When I ask for five minutes of time, will never occur a contraction, but an expansion of the same time that will diverge from what is required. Let’s think now to public offices: lethal, for employees, would be if they opened with a slight advance in order to dispose a row more than compact, it’s more likely that the office doors drawing an arc, opening, but always late. Let’s Teleport with the imagination at a conference. Start at 9.00 am on the poster, real start at 10.00 am, the time zone of another European city. The plot twist is in the middle of the conference, after the speakers were widely complained about the delay, because at some point we need a little break to reinvigorate the attention. It’s propose 10 minutes and will spend 30. The listeners, in the waves of public, notice of the time warp, but they don’t emit a breath. The deadline was set for 13.00, when by now people don’t think of anything else except the dish at the table, but it’s here that, using technical jargon, we go out of time.

Einstein argued that time ran in a subjective manner, meaning that it’s our perception of the passage of time that varies depending if the activity is more or less pleasant. In the archipelago of “Arturo’s Island” seems almost as if time has stood still for the meticulousness of details used by Elsa Morante in the descriptions. One of the sonnets of Petrarch’s Canzoniere opens with “Life runs and doesn’t stop an hour”. Life and time are equated. Life and time flows inexorably, for this is in that fleeting moment that we should strive to embed the joys of life. I propose Horatius Flaccus for the grand finale: “As we speak, the envious time will be escaped. Carpe diem (seize the moment), and of tomorrow trust as little as possible” (Odes, I, 11). Let’s meditate on these words that to the flow of time tyrant have resisted and let’s employ our energies in an exercise: to make sure that never a minute of our daily lives go to waste. It’s a matter of lancets. 

Source: “La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno”, an italian newspaper, September 17, 2012, p. 18.