Luiz Felipe Pondé’s opinion column considers how modern society relates to the dead, beginning with his memory of busy flower stalls and heavy traffic near São Paulo’s Araçá Cemetery on All Souls’ Day. He says the scene has since become less intense, which he sees as a sign that the dead have lost a place in family and public life.
Pondé argues that people today are less likely to honor their ancestors or acknowledge what earlier generations passed on. He contrasts this with traditional practices of ancestor veneration, in which the dead were remembered through offerings, prayers and rituals. Such practices, he writes, expressed gratitude and could also involve asking ancestors for help with the difficulties faced by the living.
The column then turns to Edmund Burke’s description of society as a “contract” among the dead, the living and those yet to be born. Pondé says Burke was criticizing the idea that society consists only of people alive in the present. The dead, in this account, include generations whose ideas, laws, customs, beliefs and institutions helped shape the world inherited by those who came after them.
Pondé’s central point is that the present cannot be separated from the past: people develop within a culture they did not create from scratch, and the world did not begin with their birth or end with their death.
Sources: Folha Ilustrada.