Earth does not stop. People do.
Division is no longer just an operation, but a human condition.

April 2nd 2020

3.9 billion People worldwide, more than the entire world population of 1970, are experiencing a condition of forced isolation due to the pandemic that has surprised us much more fragile than we expect to be.
Nobody would have thought that we would get to this situation into three weeks. The world outside my door has changed. I walk in the garden, that is a luxury during these days, and I try to imagine my neighbors’ lives.
There is the elderly man who sits in the chair in front of his house and waits to see people passing by; but nobody will pass.
There are those who nervously light one, two, three cigarettes.
There are those who walk dog out to have a few minutes of freedom.
There are those who dance.
There here are those who kiss.
There are those who take care of garden, and those who would like to have one.
People rediscover the importance of balconies and terraces.
Sometimes someone try to have a conversation with the neighbor, searching for mutual updates and considerations on the exceptional nature of the moment we are living, I suppose.

I am isolated from them but it is as if I had established a sort of long distance relationship between them and me. I never talked to them, I do not know their names, and I do not know anything about them.
Yet their repeated daily acts are a certainty during these days, during these weeks of unprecedented isolation.
We are children of the same human condition.
We are traces on the path of history.

bruttiemanuele.com