English
We probably owe to the Greek poet Hesiod the oldest preserved expression – towards the last quarter of the 8th Century BC – about some of the most persistent and fertile myths of Western culture. Actually, it probably relies its great importance on that, having given a coherent structure to the ancient Greek myths that would nourish human culture and creativity in the Western world during more than 25 centuries.
Maybe due to its recurrent character in the history of our civilization, among the myths of Works and Days, which denote the essentially human character of the poem, it highlights in particular the ages of mankind, which establishes the existence of an initial Golden Age ruled by Chronos and characterized by happiness and abundance. It can´t be ruled out that there hasn´t been a single historical period in the becoming of the Western world in which there has been the feeling of living, in comparison with another past Golden Age, a period of decadence, of lack of ideas, ambition and creativity. In times like the ones we live in where there seems to be a feeling of crisis and dejection which indicate the end of a era, the temptation to take cover in the nostalgia of past times where life would be truly dignified of receiving that name and with the tendency to get even better. The same phenomenon is visible in people of different ages, whose will to consider the time of their youth as a unrepeatable golden age usually has regrettable intellectual and vital consequences.
Having taken the necessary conceptual precautions, nostalgia, however, like art, saves us from the world and that seems to have been, throughout the ages, a necessity of our very own species, since it is not unusual that humans feel frequently this world as a strange and hostile place where sometimes they find it hard to feel like they fully belong to it.
This is probably the archetypal winning aspect of the Golden Age myth, dangerous in its escapist literalness, but symbolically nutritious in relation to the strange melancholy that we feel for another world that we were expelled from at some point. True life is absent, in the words of Rimbaud, or that other startling I is another that opened a world of possibilities to literature that we still barely haven´t started to explore. The mistake is thinking, aside from his artistic expression, that this lost world can be found in the return to some moment in a time which is tyrannically straight. It´s rather in the kingdom of the continuous present that lives inside one self, that is perhaps the kingdom of the essences of art, where there´s access to that golden reality that mistakenly, albeit seductively, we tend to place statically in an unreal past.
Paul Oilzum
These are some of the reasons that resonate, throbbingly and musically, in the heart of Midnight in Paris, the latest film by Woody Allen, a film that isn´t just an unsurpassable invitation to rent apartments in Paris but also clears the fact that, in what refers to the New York director, we don´t have a reason to feel nostalgia for better past times. It won´t be easy to see such a beautiful, rich, romantic, interesting, touching and funny film for many years to come
Translated by: aleixgwilliam
