Roger Cohen - Who Knows Where the Time Goes
“The pandemic is also an urgent call for national and
personal reinvention and rebalancing. After the Black Death came the
Renaissance. From the depths of economic horror came Roosevelt’s New Deal. From
this horror, so far, come the senseless twists and turns of the orange
Narcissus.
Bandits hold sway. I have visions of Howard Beale in
“Network,” and his I’m-as-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-this-anymore
that brought screaming Americans to their windows.
“All of humanity’s problems,” said Blaise Pascal, “stem
from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We are learning. Seeing
frenetic consumption for what it was, shuddering at the frantic quest for
distraction and status in the time before”.
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“...A day comes when a man notices or says that he is
thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in
relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a
certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He
belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst
enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought
to reject it.”
― Albert Camus, The
Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays