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Sunday, March 29, 2020

IF EVERY LIFE IS FOUR-DIMENSIONAL

Gatherings have been further restricted to two people, under "radical" and unprecedented measures agreed to by National Cabinet to slow the spread of coronavirus.

On Twitter, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the state "will move quickly to enforce additional restrictions on gatherings to slow COVID-19". 
Like the old restrictions, the new limit does not apply to people who live together.

Gatherings restricted to two people to slow spread of coronavirus


Poems swim free of their age, but it’s hard to think of a single poem that swims entirely free of its medium, not just language but language used in the particular ways that are poetry. Even the most parthenogenetic-seeming poem has a pedigree. The poet may not know precisely a line’s or a stanza’s parents; indeed, may not be interested in finding out. Yet as readers of poetry we can come to know more about a poem than the poet does and know it more fully. To know more does not imply that we read Freud into an innocent cucumber, or Marx into a poem about daffodils, bu that we read with our ears and hear Chaucer transmuted through Spense, Sidney through Herbert, Milton through Wordsworth, Skelton through Graves, Housman through Larkin, Sappho through H.D. or Adrienne Rich.


If every life is four dimensional,
if your “now” is just one segment of your whole
and your body spans across the surface of time,
then I could trace the sloping limb of your life
back to its source, the branch that opens up
and lets you calve off. And that branch too,
I’d run my mind along its length of years
and find the place it splits off from its mother. 
So then a family tree is not metaphor,
and you are not an independent rosebud
opening on oblivion. You’re bound
by bone to every node of human life
pinking the spotlight of right now. And what’s
beyond the bottom root? And what’s the sky?

… Say “No” to Death’s Dominion | R. R. Reno | First Things.
 … the mass shutdown of society to fight the spread of COVID-19 creates a perverse, even demonic atmosphere. Governor Cuomo and other officials insist that death’s power must rule our actions. Religious leaders have accepted this decree, suspending the proclamation of the gospel and the distribution of the Bread of Life. They signal by their actions that they, too, accept death’s dominion.
“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”

 — W. Shakespeare


 Zach Baron is a profiler, involving a strange and ephemeral genre of magazine journalism. He spends time with someone and writes about the experience. Now he can't leave  the House