Affiliation:
1. University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
Abstract
“The world is but a perpetual see-saw. […] I cannot fix my subject. He
is always restless, and reels with a natural intoxication. I catch him here,
as he is at the moment when I turn my attention to him. I do not portray his
being; I portray his passage; not a passage from one age to another […] but
from day to day, from minute to minute. I must suit my story to the hour,
for soon I may change, not only by chance but also by intention” (Montaigne,
1588/1958, On Repentance, Essays III, 2, p. 235). This musing on perpetual
change from the plague-swept and war-torn France of the late sixteenth
century seems to capture, across time, the new mindset that Covid-19 has
engendered in all of us...