The Time of the Virus

1 year ago:

The weather has warmed considerably in recent days. It is an atypical winter, with neither frost, nor snow. And when you think that Christmas is coming in three days from now, you know there is no chance for a “white” celebration to occur. But if I think about it, the last four winters were all bereft of snow. It seems that even nature has gone crazy and is in a hurry, pushing for an early spring. Where are the old snows of yore? They seemed to remain in the fairy tales of childhood. The greenhouse effect has warmed up the planet. The pollution produced by industrialization has created the greenhouse effect, which in turn has heated up the Earth. This vicious circle will “transform” or better said, “destroy” the planet, and with it, all of the bipeds that inhabit the surface. If the pollution will increase at the same rate as before, in five decades we will all vanish. So the disappearance of winters with frost and snow is the least inconvenience for now.

Othello sleeps like a baby in his basket, not giving a rat’s ass about missing snow or anything related. Who is Othello? He's a tuxedo tomcat, with which my daughter tossed into my arms this summer. The furry moocher does nothing all day long. He eats, sleeps and climbs upon everywhere. I think in a previous life, he must have been an alpinist and had teamed up with Sir Edmund Hillary to reach Everest. All day long he climbs on doors and cabinets all over the house. He is nothing but naughty kitty that has no prohibitions. I had stopped getting tired of arguing and punishing him a while ago, since nothing seemed to get through that thick furry skull of his. I left him to his own devices. What I enjoy to see is that he gets along soo “very well” with Obelix, the French bulldog mockery-of-a-hound that my daughter had brought to me two years ago, to the small apartment of only eighty square meters that myself, my daughter and my mother-in-law occupy. My wife died two years ago, from galloping cancer. So, paradoxically, at this particular time we have more “tenants” at the moment. The two furries make enough of a racket to count as much as five bipeds, so silence has become an illusion in our small apartment.

The old year is nearing its end. It hasn't been a great year. Loneliness had begun to grind at me. After my wife's death, I was quite sad for several months. I can't say I loved her too much, but we had lived together for over twenty-six years. I had a relatively calm and uneventful life. The only “big event” in our life had been the arrival of my daughter, twenty-seven years ago. It was the only “notable” thing to happen in our common, average life. You will say that I am cynical. I may be a little cynical, but our lives have gone linear, like the lives of millions of other couples on earth besides our own. What was initially a stormy love turned into friendship, then into understanding and then endurance. Many may not understand these feelings, but it is the truth, and even if they do, they may not get it right. Today's humanity tends towards absolutes. Absolute and eternal love is proclaimed by all bipeds. Nothing is more false and hypocritical. There is absolutely nothing “absolute” in this world. From Einstein with Love: “Everything is relative”. Love is relative, hatred is relative, friendship is relative, work has become relative, but a sadder fact is that thinking has become relative or more often non-existent for the human species as well. What is NOT relative at all, is life and death. However, it seems that life without thinking is as monotonous or rather as non-existent as death itself. I didn't say it, Renè Descartes said it almost four hundred years ago. "Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum", Descartes' quote from the famous book "Discourse on Method" ("Discourse on the Rightly Conducting One's Reason of Seeking Truth in the Science"). If you don’t use your head you might as well be dead. But the bipeds in the third millennium have little doubt, and almost everyone has certainties. That's why they seem to have stopped thinking. Everything comes in ready made packages. The bipeds only need to heat the up food portions in the microwave, and voila: ready made food. Nobody cuts the wood, and nobody lights up the fire in the heartplace anymore. No one cooks food anymore, or makes homemade bread. Everything is bought as semi-prepared items ready from the supermarket. The dishes are never washed again. Why? Because some of the few clever bipeds have invented the dishwasher. You will say that I am “retro”, and that I am against the progress of humanity. But I dare ask you, what progress? All of these "inventions" were created to make it easier for humanity to live, and for the bipeds to save time. But why save so much time? To do WHAT with the remaining time? Procrastinate some more watching cat videos on Youtube?

Everything evolved from the desire for “faster, better, stronger and more”. But is it truly BETTER for us? Always "BEST" has been the enemy “GOOD”. And from here, the biped invasion of the world from the last century has begun to cascade, because the overwhelming majority of the bipeds have no idea what to do with the spare excess time they have left. Today we get from point A to point B a hundred ways faster than a century ago. The best example in this regard is the flight above the oceans across the whole planet with supersonic planes. Today you can go around the earth in a maximum of twenty-four hours, and not in eighty days as Jules Verne dreamed. And this is due to the bipeds that invented and developed jet airplanes over the course of the century of speed. And when I think of the brilliant little Saint Exupéry, the father of the Little Prince, as he died piloting a war plane, I get sad. Was it the speed at which he imagined the Little Prince was traveling among asteroids and planets that had blinded the brilliant Saint Exupéry? It seems that not only idiot bipeds have fallen prey to the “speed high”, but also intelligent and visionary ones.

Let's go faster to get to where? And then do what? I bet no brilliant inventor asked these questions. Why? Because no inventor of the “century of speed” has flirted with philosophy. In the best case, they were interested in the laws of physics and mathematics. These laws became well understood, because otherwise they would not have remained in human history due to the masterpieces created with their aid. But they did nothing but destroy the primal practical sense and thinking of the generations that followed. When you have everything ready-to-go, you do not put your brain to work. And the neurons, which have succumbed to laziness anyway, have now become mostly useless.

And for me, the evolution of science and technology has lately become a nuisance. That's ever since I started writing. When I first started writing my first book, I wrote it “classic style”, with the pen on paper. It took me more than a year. Then I discovered the laptop, which has helped me tremendously. What I wrote by hand a year ago, I transcribed on my laptop in less than three weeks, and I made the grammar corrections extremely fast on the laptop. It's just that I still have to think, because a laptop that composes instead of the writer has yet to be invented. But it's still something. For one like me, who can only see with only one eye, the laptop is a blessing. You will tell me that John Milton, the author of "Lost Paradise", also suffered from a detachment of the retina. I will never claim to be compared to the titan of English literature, the parent of the notion of the "commonwealth", because the only thing I have in common with Milton is the gradual loss of eyesight. But I hope to still be able to see with my remaining eye for a few more years, and finish some more books. Hope dies, as always, last.

It seems that even for someone technologically inept like myself, some inventions are quite beneficial, and I must acknowledge them as so. There are few among the bipeds who, when alone, have nothing else to do but to start writing again after a break of almost two years. After my wife's death, I started writing again as a way to distract myself from the sorrow. I don't know why I hadn’t done so before, because nobody had stopped me. I had had enough time. It's just that I hadn't been alone. It seems that loneliness had induced a beneficial effect upon me. If I think of Henrik Ibsen's words, "the strongest man is the one who stands alone", then loneliness had given me power. The paradox is that I never was, nor did I ever desire to be a strong man. I was, and remain still, a normal average dude. My few friends say that I am kind of weird, and that I always say things not meant to be said. That would be accurate, but I liked to call things by their name, with all the risks involved. The point is that, until now, I have not had much to suffer because of it. It's just that everyone is afraid of my sharp tongue for whatever reason. In some way I could say I have been blessed by my lack of power, because even some meager power corrupts, with total power corrupting absolutely. Perhaps only Robespierre, the famous father of the French Revolution, was incorruptible, as he found himself one head shorter under the trimmer.

The funny thing is that the last feline pe(s)t of the family, the one who died more than a year ago and was replaced by the “best climber” Othello, had been called Robespierre for almost fifteen years. And I could tell you that it was an extremely corruptible furry that you could bribe with a piece of fish to sit on his back paws for five minutes. Once again, Terrence was right, because his quote, adapted to this case, would sound like this: “Non licet Iovis quod licet feles”. Translated into English, the quote would sound like this: “What is permissible for Jupiter is not permissible for a cat”. Although in my opinion, if I think of ancient Egypt, cats have appeared in human history long before Jupiter. But let's leave history and return to the present.