The Quarantine Diaries — 1. The suspended reality

What is like to live under quarantine, that’s is a bit strange and unprecedented

The most alienating impression generated by these strange and difficult days is that urban life is holding its breath. One way to describe it is this: people walk and move as if they don’t want to make noise.
I wake up In the morning and wonder if it’s Sunday: I hear very few cars passing in the street below, I see only a few people isolated or in small groups. For the rest, our cities — at least some of them (I don’t live in the red zone, even if we are all there, but whatever, it’s to give an idea) have fallen into a silence, let’s say, unusual. I don’t like dramatizing at all, so I don’t think there’s anything sinister or nefarious in this reality. It’s natural to perceive the very sharp fracture between the before and the after. Between the previous normality and the — momentary — normality of today.

If we want to refer every thought to the present and the current moment — and without projecting it into the imminent and very probable next economic crisis, as if we had risen up from the previous one — one would think that the entire city, any city in which self-imposed or non-imposed limitations are adopted, has become like a theatre in which the director has not yet…