(first part)
Initiatives are a beginning, not an end, that is why the effort to create something always starts at the beginning, starting from the end of a person or significant event. Thus, when Óscar Efrén Reyes left us in 1966, following in his footsteps, many of us asked ourselves a question: and… now?
Many of us answered with an initiative: the teachings of a person must endure in time, because that is how we humans are, we push each other, with our bodies or with our ideas.
If someone believes in eternity, this is a nuance of it.
Almost nobody has read a work more than twenty times, but if there are those who were taught to read from the school benches, they are usually people who were born very attached to silence and nature, this was Óscar Efrén Reyes, who was he going to talk to? If he did not know or did not remember his parents, nor his siblings because he did not have them in his memory.
Is it possible to speak with silence? Put a mirror in front of your face and an endless dialogue will begin; as you grow up, that mirror will penetrate your soul and all its faculties, intelligence, feelings, will.
Is it possible to talk to nature? Ask a poet, a philosopher, a scientist, a historian, from Homer, Virgil, Quevedo, Cervantes, Isaac Newton, José Joaquín Olmedo, Rubén Darío, Albert Einstein, and they will all say through their works that the dialogue is infinite.
Óscar Efrén Reyes in his work, Brief General History of Ecuador, volumes II-III, read many times by several generations of Ecuador, handles silence and nature, as necessary elements to discover what the centuries, the years and the dead hide, through the use of questions, phrases in quotation marks, bold letters, by them, the reader will know how to discover, responding in his inner silence, the categorical statements, the answers of the historian.
To discover, for future generations, the motives, reasons, feelings and desires of the present and past humanities, is a historical risk that Óscar Efrén faces with courage, bravery and truth, always attached to silence, to nature and to truth.
Curious is the first problem posed by the historian: what to do in the face of a powerful and superior, in weapons, armies and shrewd tactics?
And it is answered with the phrases of the intelligent and powerful people: “Last day of despotism and the first of the same”.
What would the historian want to tell us with this sentence in bold letters?
He adds no more and expects the reader to answer himself: will there always be despotism, will we always have to fight against this monster, will it not be better to accommodate ourselves, to submit, to pay tribute to the stranger?
One thing will always be clear to the historian. He does not write for the past, he always writes in the language of the future. Author: EDGREY.