Yesterday I found time to take a short bike ride along the river path to the North Aurora dam.  The river is less swollen within its banks than my last visit some weeks ago to this spot.  Just below the dam on the bank under a bit of shade I read more from America by Jean Baudrillard.  A few yards away the river in its sempiternal flow came over the dam with undulating, incessant roar. 

Coincidentally I read these lines written about another phenomenon of Nature which escapes language, defies description, forming the indefatigable background of every human endeavor.

The desert is a sublime form
that banishes all sociality, all sentimentality, all sexuality.
Words, even when they speak of the desert
are always unwelcome.
Caresses have no meaning,
except from a woman who is herself of the desert,
who is instantaneous, superficial animality
in which the fleshly is combined with dryness and disincarnation.

And yet, there is nothing to match night falling
in its shroud of silence on Death Valley,
seen from broken-down, worn-motel chairs on the verandah,
looking out over the dunes.
The heat does not fall off here.
Only night falls,
its darkness pierced by a few car headlights.
And the silence is something extraordinary,
as if it were itself all ears.
It is not the silence of cold, nor of barrenness, nor of an absence of life.
It is the silence of the whole of this heat over the mineral expanses
that stretch out before us for hundreds of miles,
the silence of gentle winds upon the salt mud of Badwater,
caressing the ore deposits of Telegraph Peak.
A silence internal to the Valley itself,
the silence of underwater erosion, below the very waterline of time,
as it is below the level of the sea.

No animal movement. Nothing dreams here,
nothing talks in its sleep.
Each night the earth plunges into perfectly calm darkness,
into the blackness of alkaline gestation,
into the happy depression of its birth.

Excerpt, America by Jean Baudrillard p. 71

A river, and a great desert, like all of Nature are realities beyond our ken.  The Covid-19 virus is like that.  What we think about it, our weariness with social distancing and yearning to socialize, to get back to life in the old way, and our political fantasies are all, — irrelevant. 

The virus comes at us in its own wordless way.