La Caldera. No. 21

The traces that time leaves ... The years always leave their mark ... The inexorable passage of time ... These are some of the expressions that we use, popularly, to refer to how each lived almanac, how each passing moment leaves its marks, its traces, her footprints. In the Baroque period, man fell into a state of existential heaviness, not only at the economic, political and social level, but was constituted at a time that plunged him into an existential crisis; the baroque man, discovered and wrote with horror, on the ephemeral condition of the human species. But not only the man of the Baroque has been concerned with the finite and definitive passage of man on earth, also civilizations such as the Greek, the Roman, the Egyptian, and closer to us, the Incas, the Mayas and the Aztecs, They have worshiped the passage of time, even created their own ways of recording it, their own calendars and kept a record of what they were living. I dare say that the difficulty does not lie in the physical marks left by the inescapable, the inevitable passage of time; I dare to affirm that the problem is not to leave positive traces, in not leaving any praiseworthy trace, nor a pleasant mark "no wake in the sea", in the words of Machado, on anything, or on anyone.