There are no ruins without the triumph of vegetal life over that

which one day proudly rose over the earth. Clearly, everything that is

built on the earth in a certain way humiliates the earth. And so, it was

an ancient rite to make sacrifices to the gods of the place – each place

had an owner – in order to placate them so that they would permit the

rising of the fabric built by human hands. The act of setting up an

edifice shows the triumph of man over nature, as well as over history,

the historic work that would be so strange to a non-human beholder,

if there were one. And in the ruins, the human has been laid waste

but not erased. From that triumph – and all human triumph brings or

takes away pride–there remains something, which already entwines

with triumphant vegetal life, which freely runs, budding among the

broken columns and the torn-down walls. A fusion between nature

and history takes place; a pacification, a reconciliation that gives birth

to a special beauty that is dispensed by Greek Tragedy, brings with it

‘catharsis’. The contemplation of ruins cures, purifies, and expands

the spirit, making it approach the fluctuations of history, like an

immense tragedy without an author. Ruins are really a metaphor that

has reached the category of a Tragedy without an author. Its author is

simply time.

And tragedy springs from hope in an exaggerated fight with the

fatal limitations of destiny, of circumstances. Hope, the most human as

well as the most divine element in the life of man, remains free and

exposed, freed from its fights, in ruins. It is the pure transcendence of

hope.

To be sure, all ‘culture’ is the realisation of a dream–or rather

the attempt to realise it; one of those dreams that inexorably pursues

man and from which it is impossible to escape because it is born in the

indestructible depths of hope searching for its plot and at the same

time its realisation [la esperanza que busca su argumento, y al par su

realización]. Not all dreams ask to be realised, but there are some

that are so endowed with this request that they do not permit human

consciousness to rest, that they will throw man into any adventure.

Realisation is always a frustration. To that extent all history, even the

most splendid, is a failure. A failure that carries within also its triumph:

the incessant rebirth of human hope symbolised by ivy. Ivy is the

metaphor of a life that is born out of death, of the transcendence

that arrives each time something is finished [el trascender que sigue

a todo acabamiento]. It comes after the cessation of something that

went far on hope and into it [algo que fue lejos en la esperanza]. And if

Calderón exhorted us ‘to do good [obrar bien], because good is not lost

even in dreams’, it would be possible to understand this by thinking

that from all reality the only thing that may remain will be a dream.

To dream up the good [soñar bien] because good is not lost even in

death.