The world outside my window….

Part one of my little contribution to the Corona Days.

For years, the world seemed to have been turning faster and faster.  Like some Death Metal ballad on steroids.  Technology offering insane communication immediacy and destroying entire swathes of the economy, creating others all based on its own speed-mania,  eating up our time, scrolling away the past,  and hacking away at human relationships, which always need time for nurturing and maturing.

Now, finally, we have a common enemy that is ripping us out of the acceleration bubble. It is tiny, deadly, surreptitious and effective: coronavirus. A little bit of protein that lives and fights, sometimes to the death, an unpredictable killer, whose very unpredictability is its most frightening weapon.

And suddenly, human contact, already rattled by our dopamining gadgets and their applications, has to be literally physically broken by a neologism, the much-touted and imperative “social distancing.” We’re doing it, and it will have an impact. What impact?  No one knows.

This town

For the past week, my city, Geneva, Switzerland, has been in a kind of lockdown. Not full lockdown, yet. You can’t really tell the Swiss to stop altogether, and especially Genevans, who are masters of reactance. Yes, it’s a small city, filled to the brim with big and boisterous cars, usually, and it moves to the sound of motor scooters. People bustle about, trams grind through the streets, airplanes land right between suburban residential Meyrin and the city itself, liberally spreading kerosene fumes and noise over entire quarters. All of that has stopped. Monday is like Sunday in July during the “vacances horlogère,” or Christmas morning. Even the birds seem to stop tweeting after their wee-hour wake up calls.

For the past 10 days, a blissful silence has fallen upon us here, as it has upon many other people living in formerly noisy and polluted cities around the world. It’s quarantine time, sort of, named after the forty days ships suspected of having the plague on board would have to wait before docking in Venice in the 14th century. And it’s bang in the middle of the forty days of Lent (didn’t see that coming). There’s more than just serendipity here. There’s an irony, too.

Our society is generally hyperventilating in its frenetic attempt to work and consume itself and its habitat to death, all that, to  pay egregious rents, mortgages, college fees, insurance, vacations in foreign places thanks to cheap jet fares,  in addition to  food, clothes, and, of course, the latest tech product – otherwise, who are we? It’s a great question to ask oneself in the isolation of a lockdown.

So now a bug has shown up that attacks the lungs, our private hyperventilating technology, as it were. So it’s time to stop. The dying is tragic. On the other hand the planet is breathing again…

Time it is

The virus takes our breath away when it strikes, it lames, then kills, and that is a tragedy. Yet collectively, it has given us time to breathe again, as long as we know not to stare too hard and with bated breath at its lethal progress, or listen to the breath-stopping, jaw-dropping idiocies uttered by certain heads of state, whose self-absorption and willful ignorance have seriously prevented a timely and concerted response to coronavirus.

I browse through Twitter and Facebook and the web in general, and I find people filling time often with great creativity, writing memes and blog pieces, filming tik-tok clips, trying out online choirs, etc. For some it may seem difficult to stay home. The routine of work outside the home, school, the factory, the office, is what gives the music of our lives its distinctive beat. Several people I have spoken with these past weeks forget what day it is. They’re like prisoners of some of the darkest regimes who have to maintain some semblance of sanity by simply scratching the passing days on the walls. Or at least, that’s what I seem to remember from the literature.

We’ve heard about the dark side, too. Abuse. People on top of each other. Women and children stuck with an abusive partner or parent and without any escape. Neuroses and psychoses rising to the surface in closed spaces. I cannot help but think of those tiny apartments rented out for huge sums of money, the stress on people, the worries about one’s financial future.

For well-trained freelancers, staying at home is normal. Our advice can be heeded. I’ll get to it in the next installment. Right now, I’ve passed the 500-word limit I’ve set for myself, because, after all, we no longer have the stomach for much more, and that is something we all have to live with.