Francisco de Goya, Time and the Old Women, c. 1810–1820. Public domain.
Francisco de Goya painted this nightmare somewhere between 1810 and 1820, during those black years when he’d gone deaf, half-mad, and wholly honest. The result is Time and the Old Women – a canvas in which social comedy collapses into a danse macabre.
At first glance, we see two women. They wear their finery: lace, jewels, a powder-blue gown. But their faces are no longer human; they’re skulls dressed for a masquerade. One clutches a placard marked with the words Qué tal? (‘How are you?’). It’s the polite greeting of Madrid’s salons, now deployed as a cruel joke, for Time himself looms behind them, winged and merciless, sweeping them toward dust with his broom.
And there, in that single absurd question, Goya exposes society’s greatest comedy: we’re all corpses waiting for the laugh track.
The old women, still bedecked in lace and pearls, are grotesque parodies of polite vanity. Here’s Ecclesiastes come alive on canvas: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ Their wrinkled necks wear jewels that can’t disguise mortality. Their painted lips sneer from skulls that grin without consent. It’s the cosmetics of despair, the rouge of the grave.
Goya shows us the old truth – that Time doesn’t strip us naked; he leaves us clothed, absurdly so, so that we look all the more ridiculous. Death isn’t dignified; it’s carnivalesque.
Consider that phrase again: Qué tal? How are you? We ask it every day. A social tic, a lubricating nothing. But in Goya’s hands it becomes lethal irony. What’s the point of asking how we are, when the answer’s always the same: ‘I’m perishing.’
It’s Kafka by way of the boudoir. Imagine a society ball where every guest’s a skeleton in a powdered wig, leaning across with a fan to murmur: ‘How are you, darling?’ And the only honest reply would be: ‘I’m crumbling.’
Behind them stands Time – not with a majestic scythe, but with a broom, like some spectral charwoman tidying away the refuse of humanity. He doesn’t rage, he sweeps. We’re dust, and to dust we return; Time’s merely sweeping up the mess.
There’s something almost domestic about him. He’s not Saturn devouring his child, he’s the janitor of the cosmos. And yet, in that banality lies horror. For our annihilation isn’t even dramatic – it’s housekeeping.
Kierkegaard would’ve recognised this scene at once as despair in masquerade. He called despair ‘the sickness unto death’ – the refusal to be what one is before God. These old women refuse mortality; they dress it up in lace, and so they become monstrous.
Freud, a century later, would call this the Unheimlich – the uncanny – where the familiar becomes ghastly. An old woman’s painted cheek, a friendly greeting, suddenly become sinister when we see the skeleton beneath.
Camus might have smiled at it all: here’s the absurd, writ in powder and rouge. We seek meaning, we cling to etiquette, and all the while Time sweeps us into oblivion.
What makes this painting so unsettling isn’t only its horror, but its laughter. These aren’t tragic figures; they’re ridiculous ones. Goya was showing us that mortality, when dressed up in vanity, becomes a joke against itself.
It’s Wilde’s paradox come true: ‘Life is too important to be taken seriously.’ Death, too. When Time arrives, he doesn’t announce himself with solemn grandeur; he leans over our shoulder, sweeps the floor, and asks with mocking courtesy: ‘How are you?’
If there’s a moral here, it’s not to cast off vanity (for who could resist the temptation of lace?) but to know that lace won’t save us. We will all, in the end, be as Goya painted us: dressed for the salon, mocked by Time, grinning skulls in borrowed finery.
So when next someone asks you ‘How are you?’ – answer Goya’s way.
‘Rotting, thank you. And yourself?’
Wording 