Children might be ignorant, but ignorance leads to curiosity — which not always happens at later ages, at a time when ignorance is a servant of alienation.

It is written that the very first question I posed to my father – when I could formulate a question at all –  was “Why the stars do not fall into the ground?” His answer is not recorded, but I guess my dad would have tried to explain in small words the huge principle of gravity.

Later when I was a kid I used to hear from my senior surrounding that, the older one gets in life, the shorter times passes. Then, my fantasy figured out age development as a process similar to Newton’s gravity law:

Perhaps the Stork drop us high from the sky as new-born ones, and the closer we get to the end of the journey, the quicker the fall towards the final destiny met on the surface of earth.

Anyhow, the issue in this lines is not longevity per se, but in its association with memory. It is common to hear that longevity brings about a paradox of decreased “short-memory” while memory of ancient happenings remains intact. However, it remains a mystery how could that experience goes together with a most frequent report from seniors with longer longevity on that “times really goes quicker”.

Does it really? Or it is we going faster to the end? And what would this mean for our humanistic commitments? A late  reassessment on, as they say, “time is gold”?

I say, time does not get more “worthy” with years, just more scarce. For ‘the pile on our desk’ – stapling the uncountable themes in wait to be written, impatiently – increases with every new happening worth to be commented.

Memory

Twitter sends, not that regularly, but about once a week, an email with stats to users with a certain number of followers in their account. I read it is a Twitter service in experimental phase.

Just two days after I received the above shot-screened email from Twitter, I was asked by my son how many views, total, are reported in my Twitter stats, total? I said, hmm, total? hmm, over 50 K. I believe, since I started 2011. Today, however, when I did the screenshot for this post I could “re-discover” that such figure (54.7 K) actually corresponds to the numbers of views during only one week.

Yes, I remember what I was told on my very first question during early childhood, but did not remember (short memory on recent events is it called?) figures 48-hours old.

And The Professors’ Blog? This blog will be 10 years old in 2015. The accumulated stats since October 2005 show an approximation to half million views.

‘The pile on my desk’

In the coming weeks – uncertain how many – I am obliged to leave my twittering, or at least diminishing it notably. The one and only reason is  the completion of a book I promised long ago at Libertarian Books, in homage of the 40 anniversary of the death in combat of Miguel Enríquez, fighting against Pinochet forces. Miguel Enríquez was my best friend since school years and the book is focused on our time together at MIR, our friendship and the dreams for a society with human rights for all.

And it is not that I have forgotten this commitment. It is that the emergent Human Rights catastrophe which started after the fascists ethnic cleansing  in East Ukraine, suddenly made me to change the priorities on what I had to do with my writing time. And immediately prior to that it was the engagement for the human rights of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. A theme which I will also come back to. Thou, now it has to be after this below:

Cover of the book ‘Rebeldes Con Causa’. To be published 2014