We live in a twilight time: economic crises, wars, pandemics, cultural unrest... We are witnessing the rise of political discourses based on melancholy and nostalgia for a past that was better, incapable of making a meaningful interpretation of the present itself. A cancelled future and a past that we miss. In all of them we observe a retreat of reactionary impotence, grievance and resentment. And, above all, a sharp need: to return home.

Today, there is a melancholic response to this malaise that runs through the right and the left. In El tiempo perdido, with the help of Proust and some philosophers, Clara Ramas proposes a different way out. The melancholic clings to the beloved object and wants to return to a Golden Age - the homeland, the order, the gender and class roles, the better life of our parents, the Transition, Tradition. But the return is impossible for us, finite, speaking and modern beings. We are always on the move, but never quite at home. Still, there may be a miraculous chance to “get back time,” but it certainly won’t be the one promised by the new melancholics and reactionary forces.