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- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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A deserted Rome: ‘We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time.’-Photo: Daily Mail
A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future
The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks.
Photo: Spiegel
‘I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance.
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- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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Something timely and timeless to Read this Sunday: Our Ways of Dealing with Pestilence
This is a time for solidarity and hope
Photo:quickenme.com
Good morning. Perhaps you have already read this book, La peste (The Plague) or you may have not heard about it. Reading about it myself the other day, I could not believe what I was reading. The words of this visionary author, Albert Camus, writing in the 1940s and its relevance to our current global pandemic crisis is nothing but prophetic.
“There are plagues, and there are victims, and it’s the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.”
“They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.”
The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien has called La peste “a sermon of hope.” It’s worth revisiting that hopefulness – the spirit that prompts the Camus’s narrator to declare, famously, that plagues remind us “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
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- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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Coronavirus Crisis and the Spirit of Kindness, Generosity and Volunteerism
‘Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see’- Mark Twain
Photo:The Guardian
Coronavirus Crisis and the Spirit of Kindness, Generosity and Volunteerism