When the Authorial Rabbit was a kit, he took piano lessons. He did quite well, despite a contrary nature (his own) and dogs barking, snarling and snapping at his paws and tail when he traveled to his weekly lesson and back. His teacher was firm but kind. Throughout his early teenage years he persevered, despite the lure of his cohorts’ estral night time cavorting. Later, he left off his piano and other childish things, and took up official work.
Now we are home again. The virus is keeping us here. Most of us, who have retained trust in our scientific experts and those government leaders on the world stage (those, for example, in South Korea, Canada, Germany, France and Denmark who are credible and who wish to protect our families and our communities) are following their guidelines to keep us safe.
We experience fear. We admire frontline workers risking their lives to save others. We wonder why they earn so little for so great a risk. One paramedic interviewed in New York received no health insurance from his employer.
We suffer with those who are sick, those who cannot be with them, those who lose their lives, those who love them.
Meanwhile at home, if we are not so strained by lack of income and missing our role in the outside world now suspended, we rediscover the enriching pleasures of domestic life. Old and new hobbies. Our spouses and children. Seen rightly, it is a gift to have time with them.
This may eventually help to engender a valuable reset to our human world. Our era — the digital, the paradigm of every aspect of life being made commercial, a turning away from history, the living in an engineered present controlled by big money and advertising/propaganda — had accelerated without our full understanding of the change. The constant distractions. Social media, non-stop news, the invasion of cynical, corrupt, tyrannical forces exploiting us for political and financial gain. Never have they been able to reach so deep. The worst of them enter our minds and destroy our peace, steal our inherent creativity and compassion, encourage hate for the Other, leave a terrain of vast inequity and discontent.
At first, perhaps, at home there is boredom. We miss friends. We miss our old life and identities outside. As it is with the child, so it is with the adult. The change befuddles us. Then we begin to engage with a new life.
The AR has dug out the piano lesson books. Begun the scales. Started over from the beginning. Titmarsh is meditating, doing yoga, walking.
“So quiet outside, the air so clean,” he related to the Authorial Rabbit recently by FaceTime. He was wearing a mask on screen, a little joke, as he did not wear it inside his house, but he did wear it to buy groceries and visit the drug store. “I listen to the conversation of birds.”
“They speak to you?”
“They speak to each other, for sure. Maybe to me too as I pass.”
“What do they say?”
“The bolder of them marvel at our species and not in a good way. Ask why we align ourselves with madness that could destroy us — and too often is destroying them as well. Destroying nature, all its species, including ours. Why we have the great capacity to behave well and to behave badly. ”
“There’s always the range. Remember Thucydides?”
“You’re thinking of the plague of Athens, which killed at least a third of the population and began the decline of that city during the Peloponnesian War and the decline of classical Greece.”
“Yes. As Thucydides documents it, people stopped respecting religion and rules and spent their money wildly.”
“I think his position was that our species is ever the same, whether facing a crisis or not — good and bad behaviour.”
“Regarding the current virus, I like his comment that ‘Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.'”
“You’re thinking of the American leader. What puzzles me is many people stick to that first story even as all the evidence points in a different direction and even as they begin to die.”
“Yes, I remember an interview with an old Nazi woman in the late twentieth century, she was in her nineties, Hitler’s photographer’s daughter, in fact, who’d married the Gauleiter of Vienna.”
“Henrietta Hoffman.”
“Right. Still a fervent believer in Hitler, right to the end of her life.”
“You know Yeats: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.'” In our era, in many eras.
“‘Ignorance is bold and knowledge is reserved.'”
“Yeats again?”
“Thucydides.”
“Well, walk time.”
“Have a good one. Keep your tail in. Remember to dance the veer.”
J. B. Thompson 