April 19, 2020 Covid Rebecca Solnit
I‘m reading Rebecca Solnit‘s The Faraway Nearby and come upon a passage about how big disruptions can materialize out of the blue:
“The other evening my friend Carolina told me about a bull that escaped from a bullfighting arena in her native Bogotá, ran down the street, and, frightened by the urban chaos, dashed into an elevator, where he gored the man within to death. Whether the man was at the height of his happiness, desperate for life to change, or just persevering day by day, the bull interrupted all that. Every day some bull gets on the elevator (…).”
Now I wouldn’t equate sitting in the sun on a Berlin balcony with sudden death in a Colombian elevator, but that isn’t the point Solnit makes either: “Trace the lineage of any significant event, and coincidences and strangers appear from beyond the horizon of the calculable.” The fact that a virus can emerge in one place of the world and trek across continents to somehow put our lives into hibernation is far beyond what anyone could have guessed.