“I believe that in the coming decades, and in those that will follow, and even in those that will come, by many millennia, mankind will know what to think. I’m not part of the historical pessimists’ exclusive club; discourses about decadence bore me; just as, I confess, the optimism bewilder me. The threads of history are not descending or ascending: they are only threads; those who are find in the life of every time and every generation. And the most important thing is that the threads resist in infinite ways, both in the catastrophes and in the successes (and God knows how hard it is to be reborn after one and other!). That is why I believe that the humanity of the future will surely know what to think. It is not difficult to imagine that knowledges, even in new contexts, will develop and in many cases will be a complete surprise to us, more not be because we had them under the nose for so long and did not used them. Perhaps its time had not yet come. Or maybe it did and we had it clamorously failed, which we must admit. It is not difficult to conjecture that will emerge new grammars to understand the world and intervene in it, and that some will confirm us in what we have been, while others will oppose each other, radically reinventing methods and purposes.
But deep down, what does it matter? It is not enough to cling to our points of arrival, as if they were the only legitimate ones, when we must begin before everything with the blessing of the future that declares us overcome. Blessed is the future that will laugh at us because we confuse everything: a change with the journey, an approximation with the encounter, the possession of things with its use, the accumulation of goods with its healthy usufruct. Blessed is the future that will criticize us for having produced so much and distributed so badly, for having walked on the Moon and then resisting so much, but so much, coming to the knowledge of our own heart. Blessed is the future in which technology will cease to be a fetish in the hands of the market, as it already is to a large extent, and will become a better instrument for everyone’s life, as happened, for example, with the plow or wheel. Blessed is the future that will inspire us with more essential life styles, more attentive to other human beings, but also to all the other creatures who share with us this mysterious adventure, and of which we know so little. The future will know how to find the space and expression of its thinking.
There is one thing that surpasses every other desire: that the humanity that will come to inhabit that who is for us the future will often realize that we do not know what to think. Let it be baffled by the inexplicable splendor of every dawn; that it remain speechless before the sea, as those who saw him for the first time; who feels irresistibly attracted by the variations of the colors, volumes and odors of the daytime and night landscape; that feels crossed by a thrill to the first contact with the water; that maintains the capacity to be amazed at the way the wind takes away our happy voices; that looks the same way helplessly at the rain, the flooded fields in silence, the smallest and most vast things, the traffic of the clouds, the spread of the poppies that in the fields resemble words they dream. I long for the humanity of the future to relish the embarrassment of what remains unfinished, not by insufficiency but by excess, and do not hasten to catalog, describe or imprison. That its way of understanding be another way to keep (or even amplify) the amazement.”
José Tolentino Mendonça, In Avvenire
[OP translation from the Portuguese translation by Rui Jorge Martins in http://www.snpcultura.org]