First wordIN the spirit of the season, I want to present readers a nosegay (a bouquet) about the riddle of time. It highlights some fascinating notions about time in some cultural traditions, like those of Mexico and the Philippines.In June 1983, Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist and Nobel laureate, was invited by Harvard University to give the commencement address before its graduating class and faculty. The novelist replied to the honor with an address that far transcended its academic setting.'If we had left at daybreak we would be there now'He told the graduates a fascinating story:'Sometime ago, I was traveling in the state of Morelos in Central Mexico, looking for the birthplace of Emiliano Zapata, the village of Anenecuilco.'I stopped on the way and asked a campesino, a laborer of the fields, how far it was to that village. He answered me: 'If you had left at daybreak, you would be there now.''This man had an internal clock which marked the time of his own personality and of his own culture.'For the clocks of all men and women, of all civilizations, of all histories, are not set at the same hour.'One of the wonders of our menaced globe is the variety of its experiences, its memories and its desires.'He cited as a contemporary example Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement in Poland.'The daybreak of a movement of social and political renewal cannot be set by calendars other than those of the people involved. With Walesa and Solidarity, it was the internal clock of the people of Poland that struck the morning hour.'So it has always been with the people of my country during our revolutionary experience.'The dawn of revolution reveals the total history of a community.'Fuentes then concluded with a haunting reflection on Mexican-American relations and their long history that included war:'What sort of neighbors will you have? What sort of neighbors will we have?'That will depend on the quality of our memory and also of our imagination.'If we had started out at daybreak, we would be there now.'Our times have not coincided.'Your daybreak came quickly.'Our night has been long.'But we can overcome the distance between our times if we can both recognize that the true duration of the human heart is in the present, this present in which we remember and we desire; this present where our past and our future are one.'Four more sleeps to Christmas Day'Isang tulog nalang, Pasko na!' (Filipino saying).Fuentes' tale about a Mexican farmer's way of measuring time through daybreak, calls to mind our people's own tradition of measuring time by the time we spend in sleeping before a big event or letter day, such as now.This is the time of year when our young ones can hardly wait for Christmas Day to happen so they can finally unwrap their presents and gather for feasting around the holiday table. To calm down the children and ease their excitement, the old folks (parents and grandparents) urge the children to count the few days of sleeping before they will awaken to the joy of Christmas Day — ilang tulog na lang, Pasko na.It may be that the writer of the carol 'The twelve days of Christmas' was counting in the same way.Sleep of centuriesIt's striking that our cultural tradition should measure time in terms of sleeping and waking. For our people, the bigger story is not the few remaining days of sleeping before Christmas, but the 'sleep of centuries' before we wakened to the reality of liberation and independence.In a memorable lecture, the Filipino Jesuit historian Horacio de la Costa asks, 'What happened to rouse Filipinos from the sleep of centuries? What shock jarred them into this new consciousness of their identity as a people?'He answers the question by recalling Jose Rizal's answer to the same question.'Jose Rizal attributes the change not to an economic, social or political cause but to a psychological one. What it did was, briefly, that the Spaniards added insult to injury. During the earlier phase of Spanish rule, the colonial government demanded much of Filipinos, but it did not despise them. It treated them as subjects but not as inferiors. It exploited them, but it also recognized their essential humanity, and hence their essential equality with the conqueror.'But in the latter phase of the colonial period, a different attitude began to prevail among the Spaniards in the Philippines.'They began to treat Filipinos with contempt as essentially 'mere muscle, brutes and beasts of burden, they were such because they were incapable of being anything else.''In Rizal's bitter words, 'The natives lacked not only the capacity for virtue but even the talent for vice.''By adopting this attitude, the Spaniard wounded the Filipino in the most sensitive part of his spiritual being, his amor propio, that is to say, his self-esteem, his sense of personal dignity. Rizal gave great importance to this, he seems to have looked on amor propio as the key to the psychology not only of the Filipino but of the Malay race in general. It is not to be wondered then that the Filipino reaction to Spanish contempt was prompt and passionate. Not only that, it was national. It was national because the affront was offered not to a particular Filipino or to a particular class, but to Filipinos as such, as a nation, and in reacting to it, the Filipino nation found itself. What three centuries of oppression could not do, the wounded amor propio did. It brought into being Filipino nationalism.'Conscious now of their common misery, Filipinos began to agitate for reforms on a national scale. The day of regional revolts, local uprisings, ephemeral conspiracies was over. The demand for a reappraisal of the entire colonial system from top to bottom, and for its reconstruction on an entirely new principle — the principle of equality between Spaniards and Filipinos.'Such was Rizal's assessment of the situation. Such was the soil that fueled the outbreak of national revolution in August 1896. Rizal's prophecy was fulfilled. The leadership of the country passed from the men of peace to the men of violence.'And so we turn the page to the nation we became and are today.yenobserver@gmail.com
