After a month of being locked up in the house the sensation of going out, of escaping has become violently physical. Against the quarantine rules I took my newly cleaned mountain bike and following my whim headed off to wherever. The pictures you see are just some of the wondrous views of the Tuscan countryside in a lovely afternoon spring.
The countryside of Lucca is interwoven between midland and highland landscapes. A panorama of meadows and pastures and endless hills. In Tuscany, wherever you turn your head you are greeted by a bluish background of hills, while the roads are spread out enveloped by trees common in Tuscany like cypresses, ash-trees, poplars, linden and oaks. And not far is the painting-worthy presence of huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead.
The world is woundingly beautiful to see the roads empty of cars; the sky open and clear untainted by smog, the air clean and unsullied by the noise of vehicles that the birds are eloquently fresh and enthusiastic. This quarantine season has given us, if we are generous enough to listen and reflect, a preliminary taste of what the world feels like without, what the poet John Keats calls, "the weariness, the fever, and the fret" of civilized life. The earth worked to death for hundreds of years has finally won her rest day.
But we all know the remarkable capacity of our predominant culture to absorb things into normality. I suspect that as soon as the vaccine for the virus is discovered things will go back to normal again. Those who convince themselves that after this pandemic nothing will be normal again have little understanding of how our culture works. And that is what is truly frightening more than the virus itself: the cultural recourse to normality--the very normality that has thrown us in this unlovely condition of self-destruction.
Perhaps a good use of this quarantine time is to locate possibilities of cultural tactics responsive to the demands of the natural world; to create new narratives that efface our self-centeredness, counseled by a conscious intimacy with the earth that the recurrence of normality will slowly wither from our political, social, and individual choices.
We can start that narrative by riding a bike.