Trecho de "Flights", de Olga Tokarczuk

"There are countries out there where people speak English. But not like us—we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt.

How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures—even the buttons in the elevator!—are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. They must have to write things down in special codes. . . . I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something just for themselves."

.

"I think it is possible to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition—physically, intellectually, socially, financially—is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness." 

— Hari Kunzru

A cidade invisível sob Paris

Trecho do "Underland", de Robert Macfarlane

All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere. Much of Paris was built from its own underland, hewn block by block from the bedrock and hauled up for dressing and placing. Underground stone quarrying began in the thirteenth century, and Lutetian limestone was used in the construction of such iconic buildings as Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and Saint-Eustache Church. The result of more than six hundred years of quarrying is that beneath the southern portion of the upper city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms and chambers, extending beneath several arrondissements. This network is the vides de carrières—the quarry voids, the catacombs, which together total an underground space around ten times the space of Central Park.

(...) In 1786, the process began of evacuating the city’s cemeteries, crypts, and tombs and transferring the remains of more than six million corpses to the quarry region known as the Tombe-Issoire, soon to become Les Catacombes, on what was then the Montrouge Plain. A grim, ritualized production line was established for this task, involving diggers, cleaners, stackers, drivers, porters, and overseers. Every night, for years, horse-drawn funerary wagons containing the bones of the disinterred dead, covered with heavy black cloths, preceded by torchbearers and followed by priests, who chanted the Mass of the Dead, clopped through the streets from the cemeteries to the Tombe-Issoire, where they disposed of their contents. Down in the tunnels, workers sorted the remains of the dead, filing them by bones into space-efficient ricks and stacks. Minor forms of folk art emerged in the disposition of these bones: serried ranks of femurs, their gleaming lines separated by rows of skulls, all turned eye sockets outward.

The deposition of bones into the catacombs continued over the course of the nineteenth century, but quarrying dwindled away as the best limestone deposits became worked out. Adaptable quarrymen made a career move into farming, renting out some of the quarry voids as mushroom fields; damp and dark, these spaces provided the perfect growing spaces for champignons, which sprouted from rows of horse manure. During the Second World War, the French Resistance retreated into sections of the tunnels in the months following the Occupation. So did civilians during air raids—and so, too, did Vichy and Wehrmacht officers, who constructed bombproof bunkers in the maze under the Sixth Arrondissement.

*

(...) The approach to the Salle du Drapeau—the Room of the Flag—is the only time when I feel real fear in the Parisian catacombs. It is early evening in the upper city by the time we get close to the room. On the surface, people are leaving offices, walking home through dusk streets, boarding trains and buses, stopping for drinks in bars.

Down in the invisible city, we are heading northwest along a tunnel with no side turnings, the ceiling of which is dropping steadily lower. I walk with a bent neck, then with hunched shoulders; then I have to lean at the waist, and then, at last, I have to drop to my knees and can only crawl forward.

Ahead of me, past Lina, the tunnel seems to cinch to a dead end. I wait for Lina to admit that she has at last led us the wrong way. Lina says nothing. The yellow of the limestone ahead glows in her torchlight. She shrugs off her pack, pushes it behind her, loops one of its straps around one of her ankles, and then eases herself head first into what I can now see is a tiny floor-level opening, perhaps eighteen inches high, where I thought the tunnel ended. My heart shivers fast, and my mouth dries up instantly. My body does not want to enter that opening.

“You’ll need to pull your pack along with your toes here,” Lina says. Her voice is muffled. “And from now on don’t shout or touch the ceiling.

Fear slithers up my spine, spills greasily down my throat. Nothing to do but follow. I lie flat, loop pack to foot, edge in head first. The clearance above is so tight that again I have to turn my skull sideways to proceed. The clearance to the sides is so scant that my arms are nearly locked to my body. The stone of the ceiling is cracked into blocks, and it sags around the cracks. Claustrophobia suddenly grips my full body like a vice, pressing in on my chest and lungs, squeezing my breath hard, setting black stars exploding in my head.

There’s the drag-scratch of my bag behind me, pain already in the leg to which it is looped, from the effort of pulling it. Movement is a few inches at a time, a snakelike wriggle, gaining purchase with shoulders and fingertips. How long does this tunnel run like this? If it dips even two inches, I’ll be stuck. The thought of continuing is atrocious. The thought of reversing is even worse. Then the top of my head bumps against something soft.

Ahead I can just see, by cocking my neck back, that the underside of Lina’s rucksack is jammed against the dipping edge of a block in the ceiling. The pack is jerking around, trying to get free; she must be hauling at it with her leg, but it looks as if it could loosen the block at any moment and bring the ceiling down.

“Easy, easy!” I shout and she shouts back, telling me not to shout. Pop—and the bag comes free, slithers on.

(...) These are trains above us; we are directly underneath the Métro and over-ground lines, and it is decades of train judder that has left the ceiling unstable here. I want to shout but mustn’t, want to retreat but can’t, so I just keep inching forward, stone dust in my mouth, finger-scrabble against the rough rock, hauling the bag behind me, all in silence—just the rumble of the trains rising and falling away, my heaving breath, and my drumming heart. And then, after a few minutes of that sick-making fear, the space widens and lifts, and then we can kneel again, and then we can stand, and then we can walk, and then we are close to the Salle du Drapeau.

Eclipse

Observo a lua no céu azul por entre os galhos dos pinheiros e eucaliptos compridos e esguios que formam malhas de ambos os lados da estrada. Nas beiradas e no centro, onde os pneus não passam, o chão de terra está ferrugem, coberto com um manto de acículas secas e úmidas pela chuva do dia anterior, e que continuam a despencar por causa do vento. Há quarenta minutos aqui, não há nem sinal de um veículo. O caminho é tortuoso, estreito e de declive acentuado; as árvores, em certo ponto, quase fecham o céu e fica escuro como o entardecer de inverno. A lua está lá, descendo para trás das montanhas, e brinco de adivinhar sua nova posição após curvas e descidas desorientantes. Pássaros são escassos e o vento ora é pesado e faz estalar os troncos numa agitação geral um pouco assustadora, ora é tênue e concentrado nas copas altas, com chiados que lembram o som de uma pastilha efervescente. Me vem à mente o filme a Bruxa de Blair, às outras vezes que estive aqui, inclusive de madrugada e em uma véspera de Natal. A imagem da lua no céu azul, emoldurada entre os galhos, o crepitar dos meus passos sobre as pedrinhas da estrada de chão: se entrecruzam e me atravessam por dentro um medo difuso, uma urgência intestinal oscilante, a excitação — como se eu pudesse me masturbar ali —, e vestígios do assombro do dia em que vi um eclipse solar na infância, com uma chapa de raio-x recortada sobre os olhos, o mesmo céu azul engolido por uma sombra espessa e mergulhado nas trevas no meio de uma manhã, um frisson apocalíptico, a sensação fugidia de se dar conta repentinamente de que estamos num planeta suspenso no nada, e a visão desse planeta de longe, minúsculo, e saber que dinossauros, Jesus, teorias científicas, guerras, computadores, crises financeiras, tudo o que existiu até hoje e é passível de existir se deu e se dará naquele pontinho, um palco irrelevante onde se encena e reencena o drama e a tragédia de seres que montam peças complicadas para se esquecerem quem são — e então fecho os olhos e sei que sorrio e num décimo de segundo a zona indistinta de afetos e sensações contraditórias rescinde e volto a ter a consciência da materialidade do meu corpo, das pedras trazidas nos bolsos pra afastar possíveis cachorros no caminho até aqui, da máscara pendurada no pulso, da pandemia, do tempo fora de casa e do fato de estar sem celular e não fazer ideia de que horas são. 

.

The virus activates the bodily metaphor of community and society because it maps out the vital systems of our world with an inescapable mortal clarity. Just as I endlessly inventory my own body for symptoms, we are all learning to extend that heightened proprioception to the world around us. Your phone can be just as much a vector as your own hands, and so in some sense it is practical to consider them part of the same body. The person who delivers your takeout or your Amazon box is meshed into a network of people and objects that we must, as a matter of safety, assume are all connected by the invisible nervous fibers of infection. In a crowded grocery store we can see like traces of light each touch and transfer, stretching back into the fragility of the supply chain itself. Its circulatory system is made of individuals like vulnerable cells, assembling on factory floors and harvesting vegetables, driving trucks and unloading trailers and stocking shelves.

There is a potential for irony — or cynicism — in observing that the technological infrastructures that have long aroused fears of isolation and alienation are now those that we cling to in order to keep us safe and connected to each other. Where living large parts of our lives online was so recently still being offered as the reason for social decay, we now fold those so-called second lives into our primary personality, and the devices through which we access them are fused to our once-social bodies. The decay is not in changed forms of connection, but in the callousness with which we have treated the people who make them possible. The virus shows us how we are fused to other bodies as well. Paul [Ian Alan Paul] writes that we must “refuse to curtail our thinking to how each of our individual lives may be particularly impacted by the virus and to begin to contemplate the potential we collectively share to change the course of the pandemic as well as to shape the new society that emerges from it.”

— Connective Tissues, Anna Reser

Coronavírus

Trechos de dois relatos de escritores sobre a vida durante pandemia mundial

***

Roma durante o lockdown do coronavírus, por Silvia Ranfagni

I’m living in a sci-fi movie. In fact, you are too. We’re just further along in the plot than you are. A man buys food in a market in some little-known spot in China and Rome becomes a ghost town. It’s a strange movie and the popcorn tastes of hand sanitizer. This is Italy. Once it meant “pasta,” now it means “coronavirus.”

(...) Eternal Rome basks in her glory. The Colosseum dozes, a newborn cradled by seven gentle hills and lulled by the music of a past that sings ever louder today. The birdsong is deafening. Sparrows mainly. Or Eurasian hoopoe. Sounds you never heard. But they have been here since Romulus.

(...) The skies over Rome today are as empty and silent as when this city was born. The streets are like a moving picture of life in the 1800s, cars as rare as carriages. I’m among the lucky ones. I have yet to contract anything. Recession pokes its maw out, like a stray dog. I want nothing to do with it. What I do want to do is tell you about a marvelous poem by Mariangela Gualtieri that went viral here in just a few hours. As the poem suggests, major events provoke major changes. I will try to translate the opening lines into English:

“The Ninth of March, Two Thousand and Twenty”

This is what I want to tell you:
we had to stop. We knew it.
We all felt that our living was much too furious.
Inside things. Outside ourselves.
Shake each single hour—make it bloom
*

Nove marzo duemilaventi

Questo ti voglio dire

ci dovevamo fermare.

Lo sapevamo. Lo sentivamo tutti

ch’era troppo furioso

il nostro fare. Stare dentro le cose.

Tutti fuori di noi.

Agitare ogni ora – farla fruttare.

***

Geoff Dyer, a vida durante o coronavírus, nos EUA 

(...) although we’re only at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, I’m close to the end of my tether. Physical effects lie in the future, but the psychic toll is already huge—and wide-ranging.

(...) We’ve got just one little bottle of hand sanitizer, which, in another potential contradiction of Camus’s claim, I’ve made clear that I deserve more than my wife because, frankly, I paid for it. “Strictly speaking, it’s not ours,” I pointed out. “It’s mine.” The soap in our apartment is still communal, though, so we’re always jostling at the sink, bleaching our hands like the Macbeths. And what a minefield of anxiety the simple act of washing has become. Wash your hands every time you come in the house, they say. But, having got in and washed your hands, you then touch stuff you had with you in the viral swamp of the outdoors. And although we turned on the tap with a knuckle-nudge, those same knuckles were used to touch the keypad on our way into the apartment complex. Can flawed washing become a form of spreading? And how about the keys used to unlock our door? Should we be washing them as well? Once you become conscious of the tactile chain of potential infection, the ground rapidly gives way beneath your feet. We’ve now got a routine, have established a sort of cordon sanitaire, but how are we going to keep this up? Maybe we started too soon, especially since my hands are already rashy from the unprecedented orgy of scrubbing, soaping, and sanitizing. In spite of evidence of panic buying, it seemed that, in some ways, we were more freaked out by the bug than were other people here. Had they unconsciously absorbed the lunatic message of the nation’s leader, that the virus will one day magically go away? Or was it part of that uplifting Californian mind-set that says one must never have—let alone express—negative feelings about anything?