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There is a new infectious disease sweeping the planet, and those it doesn’t infect or kill, it locks behind closed doors. Modern man can’t sit still for longer than five seconds, so while we hide from the impacts of a lethal virus, we pass the time by watching movies about the impacts of a lethal virus. Torrenting numbers for Scott Z. Burns’ Steven Soderbergh-directed 2011 thriller Contagion are through the roof, (more…)
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Plowman from Dance of Death, 1524-26.
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I’ve spent the last 21 days in quarantine. To be honest, staying inside these last three weeks has been relatively easy for me. After all, I spent most of my time in college by myself reading books in the university library. Looking back at my experience in college, I think my real education came not from the lectures or assigned readings, but from the books I decided to read on my own out of interest and curiosity. One such book was a prose version of Piers Plowman, the 14th-century poem attributed to William Langland. In many ways, the themes of this poem reflect both my times in college and the last three weeks spent inside my home during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. (more…)
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“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Pascal, Pensées 139
“Be still, and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10 (more…)
Albertus Pictor, Death Playing Chess, 1480-90.
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There is something sinister in the springtime this year. Rather than a serving as a yearly reminder of rebirth and natural beauty, the blooming trees and emergent grasses wear the face of some ancient enemy, awoken from its long slumber. The spreading pestilence makes one long for the dormancy and stasis of winter.
This atmosphere of dread has infected every dimension of our lives. (more…)
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“But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”
– Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
The Coronavirus pandemic has rather put me in mind of Albert Camus’s classic allegorical book about the pestilence that struck the “ugly and smug little port town” of his native Oran in the 1940s. The plague is a metaphor that Camus rather unsubtly intended to represent the growth of National Socialism (more…)
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I arrived at the gym the other night at 7:50 p.m. only to be told: “By the way, we’re closing in ten minutes.” The governor had ordered all gyms to close at 8:00 that night and to remain closed until further notice. I was the last guy to hear, apparently. This was the climax in a series of events that led to my finally recognizing the gift of Corona.
I had been in a state of denial for a couple of weeks. I am still not convinced that the whole thing isn’t being massively overblown (as I argued here.) (more…)
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Greg Johnson and Fróði Midjord talk about how the coronavirus outbreak has revealed the intellectual bankruptcy, corruption, and incompetence of the current system and how it creates an opening for sensible nationalist policies.
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People want someone to blame for the coronavirus outbreak. The obvious culprit is China. It originated in China, China tried to cover up the outbreak for weeks, and the communist state has not been open with what it knows about the virus.
But liberals don’t want to blame China. They want to blame Donald Trump. Surprisingly, many on our side share this view. (more…)
The Plague on the Stairs, Theodor Kittelsen, 1896.
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It is not without a certain excitement that I realize that current events, horrible as they may be, will force many of our contemporaries to reevaluate their blind faith in the Liberal world-view. This isn’t business as usual — and the naive need a wake-up call. But these events also interfere with our own plans.
Considering the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic and related travel restrictions, we are forced to postpone the Zagreb Scandza Forum until later this year. (more…)
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“It shall come to pass, saith God, throughout all the world there will be chaos, there will be floods, and famines, and earthquakes, and fires, and plagues on every side, even before [March 2001] is past.” (Brother Stair, 2001 Prophecy) [1] (more…)
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Coronavirus, or COVID-19, the virus which originated in China, has now swept the globe. People are sick, many have died, there is widespread panic, entire nations have been shut down, and daily life has been disrupted virtually everywhere at this point. (more…)
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