Novels, films and paintings offer more than escapism – they provide hope, which is a vital precursor to change
Long before the arrival of Covid-19, the speed and contents of the news had made me feel almost overwhelmed with fear. Faced with a flood of images that includes migrant children in cages, melting glaciers and forest fires, it has felt impossible to process information, let alone assess the best way to react.
We’ve entered an era characterised by the twin forces of speed and instability, in which a superabundance of potential threats – running from Islamic State to nuclear war, the rise of the far right, Brexit, environmental catastrophe and now a global pandemic – is matched by a dearth of time in which to process them. It’s impossible to keep up, and far too alarming to look away. Thanks to the accelerating effects of social media, it’s begun to seem as if the social landscape is shifting at such a rate that thinking, the act of making sense, is permanently balked. It’s increasingly difficult to distinguish real danger from rumours, speculations, conspiracy theories and deliberate lies, a process the spread of coronavirus around the globe has only intensified. Logging into Twitter or following the rolling news has meant being trapped in a spin-cycle of hypervigilant anxiety.
If this virus shows us anything, it’s that we’re interconnected, just as Dickens said. We have to keep each other afloat
That’s the thing about utopias, they keep you going, in a way that reading The Road does not
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