Corona tells us to return to our roots; corona says only technology will save us. It says the world is going back to nationalism; it shows that only through cooperation and globalization will we win. After corona, people will move to farms to be close to the land; after corona, everyone will realize we can work entirely through screens.
Oh God, so many interpretations about meaning and about the future. Man wants to hold on to something stable, so he prophesies. But as Niels Bohr said, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Let us be a little perplexed. Don’t rush to plant exclamation marks. Whoever truly wants to repair had better also be perplexed. To let things sink in. To ponder. To turn it over and over, and even to change our minds every other day. To flee from dogmatism. Not to assume what we set out to prove, to beware of becoming preachers at the gate instead of an old Native American raising a hand to the wind, honestly and truly trying to listen to it and not to the musings of his own heart.
I’m attaching here an extraordinary passage by Berl Katznelson from the midst of World War II, on the necessity of sometimes simply being perplexed. Simply not knowing:
“When I see a man walking among us as one who has resolved every difficulty and refutation, or as one for whom a new ‘Guide for the Perplexed’ has been composed and sits in his briefcase, or as one who needs no such thing, because his lucid mind has never known perplexity — I wonder whether he lives in other worlds, outside our vale of tears with its upheavals and its torments and its stolen hopes, or whether he satisfies his soul by chewing the cud, which is what settles every difficulty. As for me, I prefer a perplexed, wandering, restless soul to a soul without blemish that rests, even today, upon its certainty.
Everyone seeks to escape the perplexity; everyone wants a way out. And if there is no way out — then at least an explanation. All the more so the educator, who by virtue of his position and role is ‘forbidden’ to be perplexed: he must explain, and therefore he must ‘know,’ and he must ‘prove’ that current events do not contradict the views he holds and toward which he educates. But precisely for this reason one must warn against the tendency to grasp at a way out that leads nowhere and at an explanation that explains nothing. And the educator who comes to explain to others must first explain to himself — an explanation free of deception in words and deception in thought.
Sometimes a crack appears in a building. The good builder, who does his work faithfully, does not seek to hide it; he does not fear for his good name; he trembles for the fate of the building; he fears collapse. He does not explain the crack away — he tears down the cracked courses and clears the way for laying whole ones. But he who does his work deceitfully hurries to seal the crack and plasters it over, and his mind is at ease if he has succeeded for appearance’s sake. The collapse will surely come. Let us not be workers of deceit, neither in deed nor in thought. Let our lot not be with the plasterers of plaster.”
(“In Praise of Perplexity and Against Whitewash” is a speech Berl Katznelson delivered at a gathering of Youth Aliyah counselors, July 8, 1940.)
And here is another wonderful passage I saw today in “Blindness,” a book describing an epidemic that turns an entire country blind. The story’s heroine walks down the street and hears masses of “prophets” interpreting the situation. Here it is:
“On their way home they crossed a large square where groups of blind people were listening to speeches by other blind people. The speakers turned their faces fervently toward the listeners.
There were proclamations of the end of the world, of salvation through repentance, of the vision of the seventh day, the coming of the angel, the cosmic collision, the dimming of the sun, the spirit of the tribe, the essence of the mandrakes, the tiger ointment, the virtue of the zodiac signs, the regime of the spirits, the scent of the moon, the claim of the darkness, the power of exorcism, the crucifixion of the rose, the purity of the lymph, the logic of cannibalism, painless castration, the divine tattoo, and thinking that is convex, concave, flat, vertical, slanted, concentrated, scattered, elusive…”
(Blindness, José Saramago, page 235.)
