{"id":6742,"date":"2019-07-07T10:32:49","date_gmt":"2019-07-07T08:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/?p=6742"},"modified":"2022-03-21T07:28:22","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T06:28:22","slug":"the-green-glass-maze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/the-green-glass-maze\/","title":{"rendered":"The Green Glass Maze"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

They emerged from a privileged natural setting. They could name every type of tree in their green woods and could catch wild trout with their bare hands. They spoke the ancestral tongue, filled with as many nuances as the countryside through which they ran and leapt. They knew the name of every species of butterfly, names that were formed in such a way that their sound vibrated in time with the beating of wings; every name matched with the species that it described, and with that species alone. They were endlessly, naively happy in a time when there were no clocks to mark the hours.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Forearmed by their\nforbears (though some were gone, lost in an unjust civil war: betrayed by those\nclosest to them or gunned down on the battlefront), but knowing less than they\nneeded to know, they were almost unaware that they lived in a maze with green\nglass walls. They were incapable of reading the contradictions dragged by conscience\ninto the gazes of the adults to whom they looked as a reference point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their valley, their\nlanguage, their people and their natural surroundings made up their homeland, and\nthey flowed through it with all the spontaneity in the world, oblivious to the\ndeep social tensions building up around them like the high tide on a calm day,\nthreatening to drown everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And one day,\nunexpectedly, the great, invisible wave broke over the sea wall and they were\nleft breathless, faced with a choice between dying and learning to breathe the\nwater that rose over their heads. They had never known how much of a threat was\nposed by the wave, or indeed that it existed at all, because hitherto they had\nfloated along on its surface. By the time they realised, it was too late and\nthe critical point had been reached at which the wave broke and swept everything\naway in its wake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And on that day, all\ntoo soon, their sturdy hearts and bodies came up against the truth; the truth\nof those who had to leave to save their skins; of those who betrayed their\nheritage and their dear ones to embrace the welfare that had been snatched from\nthem; of those who vanished down some unrecorded path; of those who came to sit\ncomfortably on a seat forged over centuries, unaware of its incalculable value,\ncravenly protected by unjust, disproportionate force; and of those who, in all\nhonesty, were too weak in their bonhomie and were incapable of reacting. They\ndid not yet know that they would be the key players in the next scene in the\nnever-ending play of life, and that there was a role already written for them:\ntragic for some, heroic and innocuous for others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The winds of change\nswept simultaneously across the Pyrenees and the River Ebro and raged through\nthat valley as an uncontrollable tornado, touching capriciously upon precisely\nthose spots where they scampered in their innocence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ingenuousness,\ninjustice and passion drove them to militancy and drove them underground. They\ndid not know that in the war that was to be waged there would be no rules, no\nlimits; that codes of honour bind only those who believe in them; or that it is\nthe size, strength and resources of one\u2019s adversary that determine the final\noutcome. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their romanticism led\nthem to believe that a feeling of rightness grounded on a distinctive cultural\nidentity and a cultivated revolutionary ideology tipped the scales in their\nfavour, but they perhaps failed to realise that in wars there are no settlements\nbrought in by unbiased judges and juries: just winners and losers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their youth and the\nstrength and flexibility of their bodies at that age when death seems so far\naway that one acquires a dangerous feeling of immortality, kept them from\nseeing how fragile they were, and how ephemeral any human being is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There, at a time when\nthere was spontaneous and, apparently, complete consensus, they forgot that\nevery human being is unique and that even when they are as closely in tune as\npossible no two individuals ever have identical levels of commitment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor did they realise\nthat outside the discipline of geometry there is no such thing as a perfectly\nflat surface: in reality they are all flawed by roughness and cracks, even though\nthe flaws may be imperceptible. Without knowing it, they themselves became filled\nwith the same doubts and contradictions that they had lived and breathed in\ntheir valley; the same ones that had troubled their parents before them, but\nrenewed and adapted to fit their generation like a glove. And so came betrayal.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"

The Arrest of Christ (Kiss<\/em> of Judas<\/em>), 1306 by Giotto<\/em> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It is so much easier\nto win quickly, individually by cheating and breaking the code of loyalty than\nby working together for a just but unlikely cause!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Small-town syndrome\ndid the rest: one libellous piece of graffiti casting doubt on the loyalty of the\nmost loyal among them. As he fell into the chasm that leads to mental and\nemotional hell, he recalled his uncle, who had survived a collective shipwreck\nthrough a mixture of bravery and good fortune, and who years before had dared\nto carve out a second chance for himself elsewhere; in a far-off place to which\nhe carried his fondest memories of the valley, stone by stone. He took him in\nwith all the love of a father. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there, playing\nthe hand dealt to him at birth in the card game of life, a game which he ad never bought into\u201d\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were the\nunwitting protagonists of an experience that was unique but is repeated day\nafter day, in a maze with walls of green glass through which we all wander unknowingly,\nwithout ever fully understanding that with every step that we take there is no\ngoing back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there we remain. Now\nit is the turn of younger generations to walk the maze, and our turn to pass on\nto them what we have learned: that life is a blank page waiting to be written,\nbut embedded in an urn in the form of a green glass maze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the film shows,\nthere is no reason to be pessimistic, and indeed no excuse for being so,\nbecause even far away from the valley there is always some refuge where he can\nbe almost as happy, where he can take his memories and the names of the\nbutterflies, which can be understood in all languages, which can be written\ndown on paper and which can be kept in matchboxes to show children.\n\nAnd his best friend will always reach that place of\nrefuge, albeit at the last minute or even later, to write the best of epitaphs\nas only he knows how, so that those closest to him can celebrate his passing\nwithout setting the scale of its true, eternal meaning, to keep walking through\nthe maze with that hint of unawareness that is essential to avoid falling into\ndespair. \n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now it is the turn of younger generations to walk the maze, and our turn to pass on to them what we have learned: that life is a blank page waiting to be written, but embedded in an urn in the form of a green glass maze.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6745,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[497,498],"class_list":["post-6742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beyond-math","tag-betrayal","tag-maze"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6742"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6749,"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6742\/revisions\/6749"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmc.deusto.eus\/enzuazua\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}