The Quarantine Diaries — 5. Stop thinking

What if it’s a solution?

The idea is that there is no idea. What will happen next, nobody knows. This is an unprecedented situation to which we try to respond with known patterns and methods.

The attempt is to intervene on the social body as if we were dealing with a sick person. There are those who are sick of this disease but we are all sick of it now, even if indirectly. A therapy is given to all of us and it is as unknown as the one used to fight the virus: we try known remedies, hopefully nature and human resistance will know what to do. We are told that life and economy will be supported in this transitional phase, because this status must be maintained, after all we only know this reality, this is not the time to experience anything else. We would not even know how to do it.

We have the most unprecedented future that man has ever seen in front of us: we know that this will end but we do not know when and the metaphor of the house and what is outside is not even a metaphor anymore: it is reality. Nobody knows what’s out there.

The future is not dark, it is not indefinite. At best it is covered by a thick fog, at worst it is black, as if it didn’t exist. We’re all in an unknown territory. No one’s ever ventured this far.