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IN SEARCH

OF LOST TIME

by Cesare Patrone *

Mais, où sont les neiges d’antan? Many might have felt the need to
wonder about the time gone, maybe with a bit of regret. Where is time
lost? The same question was considered by François Villon in his
“Ballades des dames du temps jadis” even if referring to a different
social and temporal context. And where the snows of previous years
have gone, is not always easy to determine, both from a practical and
an ethical point of view. In the flowing of time everything has always
been fleeting, even if in a continual renewed hymn to life, we can
imagine the snow. The ruit hora is the more fleeting now in the time
phase where we are now, in which anxiety, speed, frenzy and
appearance affect our progress and seem to be the only characteristics
of our life.
Away from les neiges d’antan: where are the references, the foundations,
the values of yesterday that we today call to assess our life in vain?
Nevertheless teaching, instructions and warnings are not missing. It is
Nature itself that indicates them, but mankind as a whole avoids
complying with them. As when for example we expect to be lords of
the mountain and we confront with it with careless arrogance risking
ours and other people’s lives.
The arrogance we referred to is meanly the product of frequent
oversights, or dissonances, that man seems to show towards the
Creation, not in the plan of an unreal bio-centrism but of a real
anthropocentrism that places man in a correct position in the .3
environment. That has been recalled by card. Renato Raffaele

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* Head of the State Forest Police Force n
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