One of the things I enjoy the most is experiencing the passing of time. Strangely for such an unavoidable thing, it’s actually not that easy to come by. There are only some moments when it becomes truly feelable and these are the small opportunities that I cherish.  Dusk is my favorite time of day. I purposely avoid turning on the lights, whatever it is that I’m doing, so I can experience the changes in light hue and intensity. To read, to cook, to bathe in the half-light seem so real. Similarly, I love seasonal transitions and in winter I delay turning on the heater as much as possible. It is as if the cold I’m feeling functioned as a ground connection that keeps me in touch with the rest of the Planet and gives me something in common with ancestral humans. Less frequent but oh-so-awesome: a storm gathering, changing tides, sunflowers turning…

Image: sunset in Koln, Jan 2009

Eisenhower saw two threats for us and let us know. It is hard to find a picture where Eisenhower doesn’t have his Eisenhower face, the smiley one. But when you get one it’s usually an amazingly good one, one in which, as opposed to its more abundant counterparts, Eisenhower seems to be looking both inside his head and far into the distance. Eisenhower’s stare is one of courage and caution, I think of it as the stare of a man that prepares to walk across a minefield who trusts his judgment to guide his step.

I like the Middle Ages. They’re the underdog of History, and for that miraculously unspoiled by pop culture. But more than that, they’re the beginning of what could have been.

The Middle Ages were called “Middle” before they were in between anything. In 1469, when the name first appears, there was still no Renaissance for the Middle Ages to be in between it and Antiquity. The only thing the *Middle Ages* were in between of, was the desire of the “Renaissance” men to see themselves as the heirs of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Nomen est omen…

The slanderous renaissants conquered the Middle Ages, not unlike they conquered the Americas around the same time: not just in flesh and blood but also in memory and soul. It’s easy to see how, with Man at the center of the Universe, the renaissants grew to despise the understated Middle Ages. There’s never mercy when grandiloquence meets sobriety.

Medieval people were by no means extraordinary. They imposed upon themselves the same evils that their predecessors and successors did (and we may always do): they warred, persecuted minorities and separated the rich from the poor. There was just one difference between medieval people and the renaissants in this respect: medieval people never claimed to be doing this in the name of “civilizing Man”. On the other hand, paradoxically, the renaissants managed to get away with this claim in spite of the Spanish, Portuguese and Roman inquisitions, the Protestant Reformations and their subsequent wars, and the witch hunts (yes, all these happened in the Renaissance, and well into it). Maybe the medievals would have been luckier if they had tried writing treaties about how their enemies had no souls.

If I had to choose one word to describe the Middle Ages, that word would be “unassuming”. While the renaissants were full of certitude about their own and the others’ souls (or the lack thereof), medievals were more careful, tentative. Despite the popular notion that the Church crushed any secular thinking, the Middle Ages witnessed the separation of Church and State in the Magna Carta, the signature of the Concordat of Worms which for the first move against the divine right of kings, and the birth of the Scientific Method. Scholasticism flourished as Medieval people tried to understand life and its contradictions, the world of Faith (the ideal) and the World around them (the real). Medievals were people of dialectics, not of rhetoric.

The Medieval world produced an amazing number of inventions, but these were, as it corresponds to their times, sublime only in practicality. To Medieval people we owe: the button, eye glasses, the heavy plough, the wine press and later the printing press, the horse collar, spurs, mechanical clocks, the blast furnace, mirrors, windmills and soap, they discovered that infectious diseases spread by human contact and invented quarantine, they adopted Arabic numerals and created universities, among other things.

The world of the Middle Ages, as imperfect as it may have been, grossly mocked by the savage “Truth” of the Humanists (with their most restrictive idea of what Human ever was), was a world of harmonization, a world of philological caution and conviviality. A world of buttons, wine presses, eye glasses and heavy ploughs. A world of inventions to the measure of Man, not of Man measured by his inventions.

I had never realized how young Gene Kranz was when he led Mission Control at NASA. Born in 1933, Kranz was just 36 years old during the Moon landings and the Apollo 13 crisis. He’s not so known for this, but he was 34 when the Apollo 1 caught fire.

Apollo 11 is a success story about how the Moon was attained. In its more particular way, Apollo 13 is a success story about how disaster was averted. And, I think, in its very unique and quiet way, Apollo 1 is also a success story about conquering failure.

When the pressure is too much, when you don’t even dare think what could happen if you failed, when you realize that deadlines are approaching and you know you’re just juggling stuff and you know it’d take a miracle for things to come together, sometimes things go very wrong. Things go Apollo 1 wrong. But then there’s what you do with it, and that’s what changes everything.

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough’ and ‘Competent’. ‘Tough’ means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. ‘Competent’ means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased.

Gene Kranz, NASA Flight Director & Mission Operations Director (1960 - 1990)

La dame à la Licorne, celle qui a tout vu, tout goûté, tout senti, tout touché, tout ouï… Elle renonce aux plaisirs matèriels.

I remember that once I was walking with Pablo and we saw an old woman, very thin and very wrinkled, leaning on a walker, holding a shopping bag, walking like this: (1) slide right foot 5cm forward, (2) slide left foot 5cm forward, repeat (1) and (2), (3) lift walker and land it 10cm ahead. 

‘Time is a crazy thing’, Pablo said. And right there, when I though he was going to reflect about old age, he was creating the Quotidian Theory of Relativity: ‘In an hour you can shower, make dinner, have dinner and walk to the corner to buy cigarettes, can you imagine how little she can hold in an hour?’

The classics as you could buy them in Ikea.

The Old Man and the Sea

Santiago is an old fisherman who has gone 84 days without catching any fish, so he goes to the supermarket and buys a packaged dinner mix.

The Little Prince

The fox said ‘It is the time you have spent with your rose that makes your rose so important’ and the little prince threw the rose into the garbage can and put the lid on.

Around the year 1200 there was an incredible revolution in architecture in the Paris basin. 3000 churches were built in the area, fueling an explosion of the arts, trade, migration and all forms of entrepreneurship, constructing a legacy that still stands and provokes wonder after eight centuries.

In Chartres, as in many cathedrals of the time, masons were disengaged every time their employers run out of money. Masons worked as a company, under a master mason or architect. At the time, people depended on cash: there was a collection destined to the church construction, works were undertaken until the money was gone, and then the company of masons had to be let go and they would just go and find work somewhere else where there was funding. A new collection would kick start a new work cycle and a new company would be engaged. Nine different companies under nine different master masons worked in Chartres, each one coming and going multiple times for the twenty-something years that took to build most of it.

Every time, each master mason would take over from where the previous one had left. The sporadicalness of the collections meant that one master could not rely on an overlap to coordinate a takeover. They drew plans of course, and probably left written instructions. However, plans and instructions were not that fixed. Although none of the nine master masons ever left any signature or insignia-we don’t even know the name of any of them,-we can distinguish and single out their contributions because each of them had a particular style, their own way of doing things, of interpreting Christianity-this was at the time one of the duties of a church master mason-and making it physical for the people to see, walk into and worship.

What leaves me in awe about Chartres is how we are inspired today by a unique combination of beauty and civil engineering prowess issued from the creativity of nine anonymous men that 800 years ago worked together knowing each other only in the work each of them left behind; it’s what we can do, all odds against us, when we have an inspiration-any inspiration-bigger than ourselves.

In 1982 the UK is facing economic difficulties and social unrest. Margaret Thatcher is the first woman PM, and first woman ruler of a modern western power. The future of the crippled Conservative party depends on her.

Argentina invades the Falklands.

The British fleet goes all the way south to try to defend them. They are stationed somewhere north from the islands. The British gov declares an exclusion zone around the islands. Whoever (Argentina) steps into this zone will be attacked. The Argentine gov sends two groups of ship to surround the British. One of them is just outside the exclusion zone when a sub tracking them realizes that they will not be able to further follow and track them if they got into the shallow waters inside the exclusion zone. The matter is so delicate that Thatcher is consulted herself whether to fire on the Arg ships or not. She gives the order to fire and lots of people die.

When I think of it, I can’t make up my mind. Was she strong and prepared to do what it takes to defend/recover what she thinks is her country’s, was this one of this really hard decisions that take a very strong person to make and carry upon their conscience for the greater good? Or did she panic?