Who else senses the world shrinking around them? Was it only a year ago we could twirl a multi-hued globe and contemplate a trip to one of those inviting islets of colour?
Now, such goals have become uncertain, hazardous, forbidden even. We are confined to our country, our state, our town, a backyard. An immemorial freedom is being curtailed. We began as a freewheeling species, nonchalantly strolling out of Africa. A hundred millennia later and a trip to the local supermarket will soon be a grand day out, and even this dependent on the whims of a president, a prime minister, a mayor.
Are we destined to settle for Hamlet's fancy, a world 'bounded in a nutshell'?
That feeling of confinement and frustration brought Melville's Ishmael to the point of knocking people's hats off in the street. Today, it's masks.
And so, to sea.
I propose a new Odyssey. In the spirit of Tennyson's
'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield', it shall be a voyage to discover the origins of Covid. In time, the story may evolve to become an epic to rival Homer's. For now, we will have to be content with a synopsis.
Comment: Dorsey is right, if users don't like Twitter, they can go to Parler... oh wait.