7 los negocios de Roma mucho antes que de los de mi casa. (...) Nunca dejo de evocar y acariciar su memoria, (...) en una unión perfecta y vivísima" 18 For the great historian A.J. Toynbee, “progress” can only be measured through the knowledge truly derived from human suffering caused by the “mistakes of the civilizations”. While for another scholarly historian, J. Burckhardt, it is the performances of the human spirit, rightfully preserved, defying the passing of time, that constitute the true sense of history. One must fight for the primacy of memory over human cruelty; when looking back, the misery of the human condition can only inspire a feeling of piety, since, as it has been rightly recognized, "Time, the great destroyer, is also the great preserver. It has preserved much more than we can ever be conscious of (...). The tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time (...). (...) The tragic sense [of history] is the profoundest sense of our common humanity, and may therefore be a positive inspiration. If all the great societies have died, none is really dead. Their peoples have vanished, as all men must, but first they enriched the great tradition of high, enduring values” 19. 30. On my part I cannot avoid the impression today that the “post-modernists” – enthusiastic, with their self-sufficient attitude, and with the frenzy of material “progress”, - cannot even understand in a minimal form the world in which they live, their own environment. I have therefrom cultivated a respect for traditional cultures of those persecuted and forgotten by the world, - including the peoples of the Amazon forest. In my Separate Opinion in the previous Judgment of this Court in the present case of the Moiwana Community, I referred to the myth of the “eternal return,” so enshrined in ancient social traditions, which attributes a cyclical structure to time, in a manner which neutralizes or annuls the virulence of the merciless passing of time (para. 36). 31. The ancient, and unduly called “primitive” peoples, had a full awareness of their own vulnerability, and that was how their spirituality was developed20, and their intimate co-existence with their own dead. On the other hand, the “post-modernists”, - from whom I definitively separate myself -, upon freeing themselves from the cyclical time21, integrated themselves into history, and in my opinion became prisoners of their own unfounded belief in linear progression carried through with technological advances. They minimized the search for regeneration, attempted to avoid or to minimize human 18 . Montaigne, Ensayos Escogidos, Madrid, EDAF, 1999, p. 335. . H.J. Muller, The Uses of the Past - Profiles of Former Societies, N.Y., Mentor, 1963 [reprint], pp. 393-394, and cf. p. 388. 19 . Cf., in general, e.g., [Various Authors,] Mircea Eliade - Historia de las Creencias y de las Ideas Religiosas, 2nd. ed., Barcelona, Herder, 1999, pp. 15-563. 20 . Cf. Mircea Eliade, El Mito del Eterno Retorno - Arquetipos y Repetición, 6th. ed., Madrid, Alianza Ed., 1985, pp. 9-149; and regarding the resources about the myth to confront the elusiveness of human existence, and the fight of human beings against time in religious manifestations, cf., v.g., Mircea Eliade, Mito y Realidad, 2nd. ed., Barcelona, Ed. Labor, 1992, pp. 7-211. 21