In his dystopic story of 1909, The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster describes a room of the future.  “Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her.

There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing.  There was the hot-bath button…there was the cold-bath button.  There was the button that produced literature.  And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends.  The room, although it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”

Although he did not predict computers, Forster portrayed how we now live during the Covid pandemic.  To Forster, the way of life he described was decadent and curtailed; to us, it is a fairly successful adaption to unfortunate circumstances.  In Forster’s story, the hero must destroy this method of living and bring humanity back to “normal.”  But what about us?

     People now talk about a “new normal” after the pandemic.  I have found hope in the work of the Italian historian Gianna Pomata.  She wrote about the impact of the bubonic plague on Renaissance Europe.  (I learned about her from Lawrence Wright’s article in last summer’s New Yorker.)  Pomata argued that after the Black Plague, “nothing was the same.”  Instead of dwelling on the tragedy of destruction, she focused on renewal: “Because of the danger, there’s this wonderful human response, which is to think in a new way.”  Pomata then discussed the rise of both capitalism (instead of the medieval guild system) and democracy (instead of monarchy and aristocracy).

         Regardless of opinions about capitalism, I remain basically optimistic.  I don’t think we know yet what our positive reactions to Covid will be.  But I do believe they will occur and that we too will find creative solutions to our situation.  May it come soon.