What will you think?
Fear and beauty
Calamities possess a sinister alluring power: the crude reality awakens us from the latency of sleep.
The astonishingly attractive force of this pandemic lies in its effectiveness in reawakening our dormant senses, catalysing all the attention on itself and on something we often took for granted: our survival.
It’s happened to all of us to feel life and blood coursing vigorously through our veins, and our hearts beating fast, like when we are terribly frightened… it’s an inebriating and dizzying sensation.
Fear is something occurring inside and above us, something we can’t resist, endowed with a perverse beauty that makes us feel alive like nothing else does.
It’s mere chemistry.
This statement is obviously a provocation, but it’s not false, even if we are used to recognising ourselves as simple beings, as instinctual as scared animals.
The virus has made us face our mortality, it has forced us to focus on issues like the finiteness of our life span, to acknowledge our limits and how deceptive the sense of omnipotence that pervades mankind is, such that when we are deprived of it, like in the event of global pandemics or catastrophes, we all become more aware of our transience.
What will I think about?
I will think about the sense of existence, about how the perception of it changes, depending on the perspective through which we are unravelling our thought.
I will think like an animal, that this sensation of frightening beauty is life imposing itself in spite of everything, and that there’s not much more we need to understand.
Eva Poles
