In his well-known essay on temporality and eternity, Augustine of Hippo (1998: 221—245) reflects on the nature of time, calling into ques- tion the existence of past, present and future. In his considerations, Augustine states that the past may not exist: it existed once, but now that it has begun and ended, it has ceased existing. Likewise, since the future has not yet come into being, it does not exist either—at least not yet. In his words:
Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they 'be' when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also 'is'? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. (1998: 231)
Accordingly, the present is an interval with no duration, for if it had duration it could be divided into past and future.
After questioning the very existence of temporality, Augustine argues that past and future do not exist in themselves—as they are, respectively, 'not anymore' and 'not yet'—but their occurrence is manifested in the present. In his words, 'the present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation' (1998: 235). Hence, the present is where regimes of temporal reasoning find expression and where past and future can be conceived.
Along these lines, SAT-Amikaro members recall, in the present, the existence of a glorious past, in which the association thrived with more participating members and well-attended activities. Moreover, since these same members were younger then, they also tended to be more active in the movement. In particular, as supporters of an institution- alised forward-looking social movement, what they miss so brutally is the momentum that Esperanto once had. Their mourning is primarily related to the loss of a feeling of vibrant activism and engagement, thanks to which Esperanto seemed to stand a real chance of contributing substantially to a better world by providing a forum to internationalise grassroots left-wing politics. In this sense, borrowing Piot's expression, their nostalgia for the past is, in fact, nostalgia for the future (Piot 2010).
In his ethnography in Togo after the Cold War period, Charles Piot analyses how the Togolese moved on with their lives after the death of their dictator, holding hopes for subsequent improvements in the country's political system. The changes taking place at the time led to the replacement of the previous governmental order with NGOs and Pentecostal churches, which developed into an unstable status quo and made the future that the Togolese desired farther from attainment. In this sense, nostalgia for the future denotes longing for a future that, in the past, seemed to be closer to fulfilment than it is in the present (Piot 2010: 20).
This understanding of nostalgia brings past and future together—but at the expense of precisely the moment in which the awareness of such time-passing takes place: the present. At SAT-Amikaro, historical narra- tives about the association depict the present not as a field of action upon which members and volunteers could act but, predominantly, as a space inhabited by people who seem to have little or no power over the asso- ciations perceived decline. Along these lines, the present becomes the descriptive is stuck between the wistful was and the normative ought to
be (Jansen 2015: 37-39).
Looking at everyday lives in a neighbourhood in Sarajevo following the end of the Bosnian War, Stef Jansen (2015) explores how the locals long for 'normal lives'. Their understanding of normality, however, was almost consensually presented in terms of the lives they lived in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the war. Rather than spectacular stories and achievements, their aspiration for a similarly 'normal' future was based mainly on recollections of past mundane practices. From this, the distinction that Jansen draws between hope and yearning seems to be of relevance. As he argues, hope refers to 'a future orientation that is positively, affectively charged: a degree, however small or hesitant, of expectant optimism' (2015: 43), whereas yearning denotes 'a persistent longing. It is continuous and prolonged, and its object is known to be out of reach: it can be both lost in the past and deferred in the future'
(2015: 54-55).
Hence, the hopes that SAT-Amikaro volunteers display for Esperanto seem to be suspended between past and future, finding no ground in the present. In this scenario, their hope is replaced with a yearning, a longing to hope for the future of Esperanto. Such yearning is not necessarily a recollection of a spectacular past, but a yearning for a past that had a future and nostalgia for a fully-fledged momentum. In sum, it refers to the remembrance of a past in which the association, as well as left-wing activism through Esperanto, seemed to have a bright future ahead.
When promoting Esperanto at events such as the Fete de l'Humanite, SAT-Amikaro volunteers and activists are often exposed to passers-by who perceive Esperanto as a 'language of the past'. This perspective— according to which the bright future of Esperanto would necessarily be connected to its universal use—takes this language as a project directed towards a never attained distant future. Paraphrasing Mary Douglas (1966: 36-41), this perception conveys Esperanto as a matter out of time, with no place in the present. Thus, between a past that ceased to exist and a potentially problematic future that has not yet come into being, how can one convey the present—this emptied interval in between—as a field of action?
Pointing out that the present is where knowledge practices gain ground and where past and future are represented, Felix Ringel (2012, 2016, 2018) urges us to consider the present ethnographically in its own right, as a time interval that neither is determined by the past nor prede- termines the future. In many ways, this outlook echoes Augustine of Hippo's perspective: what effectively matters is how regimes of temporal reasoning are expressed in the present and how memories of the past and expectations for the future are mobilised as resources.
Addressing hope among young anarchists in a shrinking city in Eastern Germany, Ringel (2012) examines how these anarchists responded to the languishing of a city with no job opportunities and no prospects for the future. Through practices such as being vegan, throwing parties with alternative dress codes, producing poetry and art, as well as debating issues such as gender and sexuality, they might not be trans- forming the future of the city or provoking substantial changes in local society. However, this does not mean that they have failed as political activists. They were not addressing the distant future in the first place, but targeting more mundane aspects of life in a critical way—directing their actions, therefore, to the present and the near future.
By the same token, taking the emic perceptions of future and move- ment as our starting point reveals that, when recalling Esperantos and the associations past, SAT-Amikaro volunteers were engaging with the momentum they once experienced and the immediate references and narratives they were familiar with. What they grieved for was not an abstract, farfetched collapse of the language, but the concrete, everyday signs of the momentum that Esperanto as a means of grassroots left-wing politics once had.
SAT-Amikaro members and volunteers were overall aware of the growing use of Esperanto by young people through digital media and were conscious that such less institutionalised spaces of Esperantujo were facing fewer setbacks than their association. However, SAT's and SAT- Amikaro's hurdles in adapting to online communication and in engaging with less institutionalised political activism stood for the shrinkage of Esperantujo as they knew it. Irrespective of how weak or strong the broader Esperanto community might be, what was at risk was their individual participation in it, since the settings where they supported working-class issues and progressive causes and ritually held their debates while drinking fairtrade organic wine appeared undermined.