Reading stories in difficult times is a way to understand those times
This is something I find to be very true. Often, reading a story at a given time allows me to process my thoughts towards (and understanding of) events going on in my own life around that time.
Boccaccio writes that during the Black Death the people of Florence stopped mourning or weeping over the dead.
Detaching ourselves from feeling emotional about these things allows us to cope
“Art is what makes life more interesting than art,”
I think this is a great point, as art allows us to look back at life I feel with a greater eye for detail and from a different perspective, where we are not so obsessed in our own way of viewing everything and filtering everything. Instead kind of just appreciating things for what they are
Those penguins themselves had something of the startle of art — the reveal of the ever-present real that’s hidden, paradoxically, by information.
This is kind of what I was trying to get at in the last annotation. We're so overstimulated by new information coming in and become overwhelmed by it, especially filtered information such as what we get from our various news sources or speaking with other people. We are more immersed with being TOLD what the current reality is and what is currently happening by everyone and everything, that we fail to observe it and appreciate it for what it actually is, face value, without the clutter of opinion, filter, and also the survival instinct that we experience within ourselves that makes us only concentrate on certain bits of information that are useful to us and cause us to miss out on the bigger picture, the view from the outside, especially in a world where we're in constant information overload; much in the same way the people of Florence's brains were in overload from sudden, unexpected and horrific change in reality and exposure to graphic scenes.
, it was those curious, isolated penguins that made the pandemic real for me emotionally,
I understand this very much. Sometimes you are so immersed in something and the topic, activity, etc. has become so second-nature and ingrained in your head that it doesn't really feel real from an outside perspective, or doesn't quite process emotionally. It's just the new reality and what you've come to know and your brain has just adjusted to it as the new normal. By distracting yourself from that reality or immersing yourself in something that escapes that reality even for just a little bit, it allows you to come back to that and actually process it from a neutral, outside perspective, when you're not all caught up in it mentally. That's certainly how it felt for me at the beginning of the pandemic.
a heartbroken woman grows basil in a pot that contains her lover’s severed head
Making the stories increasingly absurd as a way of coping, creating fictional situations, and equaling or even surpassing the absurdity of the images they've seen with their own eyes. Nothing is implausible anymore, or too taboo/graphic
Wild pigs sniff and tear at the rags of corpses, then convulse and die themselves. What do these young people do, after fleeing unspeakable suffering and horror?
Puts gruesome, otherworldly images into our head; when these are experienced, everyone has to cope with them in some way; usually through indulgence in various activities, or substances, or through full on denial and detachment.
1348, in the time of the bubonic plague
Under the current context, this topic is already making me think this is all going to be connected back to our current situation and the COVID pandemic