Sometimes, rarely, not because I don’t want to, but because I get caught up in the devastation of my life, but sometimes, I get nostalgic. About what?
About the time I spent reading, in the past, a lot, when we didn’t leave a book down until we finished it;
About the ‘at the clock, at the university’ meetings, when, without a mobile phone (if you can imagine), we were always there and, moreover, we had time for others;
About politeness, gallantry, these are not considered as aggression, arrogance, disregard for women;
About the correct speech, much richer in words, precisely because we were reading more, we were choosing our words better, we rarely used the abbreviations;
About the days when I found time to walk through the park and allowed myself to observe the first day of autumn, the first snowflake, the first buds of the trees;
About the time when I did not see that there is discrimination on the basis of age, neither towards young people nor against the oldest;
About years of listening with interest to the stories of elderly people in the neighborhood without contempt, without arrogance or the feeling that we, who were younger, were above them, smarter, more beautiful and with a star on our forehead;
About the interest of those around us in history, the great movies of the world, the great actors of the world, the books we passed from hand to hand, from one neighbor to another. Somehow, everyone seemed interested in what was considered the ‘great works of the world’;
About the habit of leaving room for hello, of behaving nicely with anyone who did us good;
About spending evenings with others in the neighborhood, debating various topics, quietly, until midnight, and without considering that it would have been a waste of time to stay with people of various ages, occupations, talking, sometimes talking in contradiction, but always with a certain elegance that ordinary people had.
That being said, like Janus, the two-faced god, I look nostalgically at the human side of the past but also with great curiosity about what technological progress and research promise in the future.