The future?...

Some words here from Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, laying out the range of emotions people elsewhere in Europe are likely to go through in the weeks to come (edited down from a longer article in the Guardian).
 
“I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance. We watch you as you behave just as we did. First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do. You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days. You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it. You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.

“You’ll laugh. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all. You will count all the things you do not need. The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant. You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps.

“At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too. If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same”…