It is worth looking at the past as closely as we look to the future. In his 1991 book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Samuel P. Huntington (the American political scientist whose theories on changes in the world order and the clash of civilisations caused heated controversies) said that the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April, 1974 began the third wave of democratisation that hit the Soviet Union and the whole of Eastern Europe, and led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and which continued in Latin America and Africa.

For the last two decades, at least, we have got used to listening to a chorus of pessimistic voices, to which we attribute an ever increasing value of truth, which tell us about the ‘crisis of democracy’, ‘the unease in/of democracy’, the ailing ‘state of democracy’ and even the need to categorise it as ‘post’ to suggest that it has become necessary to update it conceptually.

In this ‘View’, the Greek author Nikos Pratsinis writes about Heraklion, the capital of Crete, the island of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. Here we find past and present, gods and humans, land and sea, mythology and poetry, history and geography, architecture and cuisine and personal and cultural memories. Pratsinis is a writer and translator. He lived in Portugal for a few years and, together with the poet Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, translated the prose and poems of Konstandinos Kavafis and selected poems by Yorgos Seferis into Portuguese.

Recognised worldwide and represented in the most important art collections, the Italian artist Giorgio Griffa has selected a representative series of his recent works for this Portfolio section of Electra. Considered one of the most radical, eloquent and effective artists of our time, his work, which is already of historical importance, evidences a poetics that combines an original concept of art, an open personal language and a subtle precision of artistic practice. In an essay written for this edition, Francesco Manacorda, an Italian curator who lives and works in London, presents Griffa's work and reflects on the creative process, deciphering its rich cultural significance. Manacorda's text analyses the ‘fine group assembled here for Electra magazine’.

With his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published in 2005, the American historian Roger Ekirch changed many ideas about past and present sleeping habits. He showed, for example, how the Industrial Revolution radically transformed both the time and the way in which people slept, especially in the cities, passing from a biphasic sleep to a consolidated eight-hour sleep, which he classifies as ‘a modern invention’. Sleep and insomnia are matters of growing concern in contemporary societies. All these topics are addressed by the professor of the University of Virginia Tech in an interview conducted by Diogo Vaz Pinto.

In this issue of Electra, two ‘Books of Hours' chronicle the days leading up to Brazil’s presidential runoff election that caught the attention of the entire world. The authors are Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, writer, translator, and research director at Radio Novelo, born in the United States and based in Rio de Janeiro; and Rodrigo Nunes, a university professor in Brazil who holds a PhD from the University of London, with a vast, widely cited work on philosophy and political science. In this period of political uncertainty, apprehension and uneasiness, people lived every moment with a stressful and overwhelming intensity. These journals give us two different but complementing insights into everyday life and politics at the time of the clash between Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. And then there are the people, animals, books, films, and day-to-day acts that have become long-lasting symbols with each passing day.

João Pedro Fróis, professor and researcher at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, writes about the exceedingly singular artist Jaime Fernandes (1899–1969), who was committed to the Bombarda Insane Asylum (later Miguel Bombarda Hospital) from 1938 until his death. Jaime’s drawings (in pen, biro or ink on paper) turned him into a remarkable representative of art brut, to whom filmmaker António Reis dedicated his 1974 eponymous film Jaime.

José Miranda Justo, Germanist, translator and artist, comments here on a sentence taken from Letters to a Young Poet, by Rilke, which deals with the complex relationship between the work of art and criticism.

Yves Klein's exhibition on emptiness was presented sixty-five years ago, in 1958, at Galerie Iris Clert, in Paris, and is considered a fundamental moment in the history of art. This essay by Steffen Dix takes it as the starting point for a personal journey into questioning the place of the void in art and philosophy. Along with Klein's name are those of Giorgio de Chirico, with his metaphysical painting, Friedrich Nietzsche, with his philosophy of affirming life as a work of art, and Fernando Pessoa, with his heteronyms and his city. Steffen Dix is a German researcher and university professor. A specialist in religious history and modernism in Europe, he is also a translator and the author of renowned studies on Fernando Pessoa.

One of the most highly-acclaimed contemporary theorists of the image and the visual, the French philosopher Marie-José Mondzain has recently ventured into the domain of the written word, by addressing Kafka’s work in a surprising essay about the possibility of decolonisation on the basis of literary fiction. Afonso Dias Ramos writes about her latest book, K comme Kolonie, Kafka et la décolonisation de l'imaginaire [K for Kolony – Kafka and the Decolonisation of the Imaginary].

Those who believe that the future will always be worse should cast their minds back 2500 years to classical Athens to discover the original dilettante influencers, if by such we mean those who apparently make a living almost without lifting a finger. Socrates wrote nothing – at least nothing for which we have a record – and yet he is a milestone in the history of philosophy. So let us not be so alarmed by the wave of influencers surrounding us today, but rather by the people who are so easily influenced.