The persistence of the memory, by Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali´s painting The persistence of the memory, one of his best known works expresses the softness and hardness of the time and space. As the professor of the Royal Academy Dawn Ades wrote in her book Dali: "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order."

I want to take this quote and portray the symbolism of the watches in Dali´s work with this relativity of time and space. How our life is totally dependent on this abstract concept that is present, in one way or another, in all things we do and which make us aware, just in a few moments in our life, that time is our contender in a battle that we know we would not win. 

As I started reading the novel "The hours" a few days ago, I found that it was a completely different experience from other novels I've had read. The sentiment of despair in the thoughts written by Cunningham that was, supposedly, the last thoughts of Mrs. Wolf made me aware that whichever the causes of our death and no matter if we end with our lives or we die from other reasons we all are time-bounded creatures. The more we read the novel, the more we understand how it makes us aware that we have a deadline; that at the end the time and how it passes by is what make us human.

Space as the physical entity that surrounds every act and our entire life is other concept that as well as Cunningham, Dali toke to represent in his works. As Dali himself expressed, many of his paintings were scenarios taken from their dreams and if we thing about that, dreams are the extension of our experiences in life and in many occasions of our satisfactions and dissatisfactions in it. In the hours, as we read we understand how the three women are in a place they don’t want to. That they roles in the society they live are making them disappear, so what is the difference between disappear in life and actually die? Is one better than the other?