The crocuses have opened and the forsythia strike the eye like lightning shooting from the earth. In a couple of days, the magnolias on Commonwealth Avenue will open only to be blown off their branches by a late March snowstorm. So the warmest winter on record marks our transition to ever-bewildering spring
We watch it all from behind glass, maintaining social distance not only from each other but from the natural world as well. Here in Medford, public parks have been closed. The streets are quiet. Everyone’s waiting...
Read More
It’s not clear to anyone what we’re waiting for. The corona virus continues to spread like a rumor — part of its sinister power lies in the distance between the present-tense invisibility of its effects and the threat we understand it poses tomorrow, or the day after. Too much of the reality of the virus is already shrouded in the predictable metaphors — war, menace — designed to scare us into behaving appropriately. And we are wise to be cautious — though we shouldn’t need to be scared into wisdom.
But the curtailing of so many normal activities leaves idle minds with perhaps too much time for speculation. One hears from many sources that the world we will meet on the other side of this will be radically different from the one we inhabit today. One wonders how. Already the effects of the pandemic, still in its early stages in much of the West, are taking a toll both on New York City and on the denizens of refugee camps on our borders and worldwide. The camps themselves have for years stood as a steady rebuke to the self-absorption, decadence, and corruption of so-called first-world powers which have allowed them to flourish in the shadows of the our gilded age. Will the corona virus pandemic lead to a recognition of universal interdependence, and the need for international cooperation, or will power and money continue their consolidations and further destabilize our lives?
These are some of the questions our writers will explore in our next special issue. But there were other things on their mind before the virus went viral.
The stories of the dead and the monuments commemorating them aren’t meant to end a conversation, but rather to launch one.
Now that I am about to become an American, I wonder if I’m ready for such a commitment.
I walk to the Mt. Auburn cemetery often to visit our plot, finding new and old friends among the dead.
I’d like to tell my 8 year old daughter that for some children, schools are their only protection.
The Same Thing, Only Different
We are perfectly free to think as long as we keep our thoughts to ourselves . . . and make sure they cannot escape.