"And so we find ourselves, in our seclusion, forced to craft an art of living, to transform confinement into freedom. Our calamity is also an opportunity."

Pascal Bruckner writes in City Journal about the challenge we face.

Locked at home, we face a crisis of mundane absurdity—and a challenge to craft an art of living.

...And the contrast between nature at a time of exploding, blossoming colors and the drawn faces of passersby is stupefying.

...Paris, like Rome or Madrid, has become the set of a horror film, but your monster is your neighbor, and you are his.

...One might say that our time has created the sickness that reflects it. Just yesterday, we feared the stranger; now we dread the renter on our floor. We have gone from agoraphobia—the fear of open, borderless spaces without guard rails—to claustrophobia, the feeling of being incarcerated in one’s own home. Now the world is more present to itself than ever. For the first time, we are contemporaries of our contemporaries in real-time, in Iran or Argentina as in Korea. Globalization by pandemic has replaced globalization by trade.

...Let’s maintain some perspective: this is not the Black Plague, nor the Nazi occupation, and still less the situation of a hostage captured by terrorists. But it is our present challenge, and it is unprecedented. It is not up to us to conquer this illness, but at most just to slow its spread. Our part, instead, is to rise to the occasion, whatever happens. Every day is a discreet battle against doubt and discouragement. It is important in exceptional times not to let oneself go, but to carry on “as if”—to dress as if social life continued, to tidy up the house as if guests were expected, to decorate rooms, prepare delicious dinners—in a word, to carry on.

...We are not equal in the face of boredom. Some defeat it by perpetual distractions; others use it to dive into a fertile reverie—these are the aristocrats of the interior life. This aristocracy is in principle open to all, being independent of riches and of birth. It consists in a mental hygiene that orders us to find within ourselves the resources needed to survive. The perception of time has changed; it is no longer oriented toward a goal but toward our improbable deliverance. There is no longer any Sunday or Monday; each day is a single day that resembles all the others in a perpetual present. What threatens us, as much as illness, is the specter of dissolution, the tempest of languid hours. Each of us deploys a thousand ruses in order to escape monotony: some transform their living room into a gym, their driveway into a running track, and move their bed into the hallway just for a change. Others exchange poems, or songs. We even hear of couples making love on the balcony to defy propriety, while across the street, music lovers improvise arias. Ingenious competitions take place, thanks to the telephone or video-streaming. A thousand jokes circulate online, including some that, we must admit, reveal a touch of nonsensical genius. Historians will tell us later how populations developed a mental immunity against fear, or how they built for themselves an interior fortress in order to repress sadness and allow the entry only of beauty, talent, humor, the unusual, and testimonies of love and friendship. And so we find ourselves, in our seclusion, forced to craft an art of living, to transform confinement into freedom. Our calamity is also an opportunity.

Read more here.