Plague Journal, Sunday
The world, meaning the wider, invisible context of my life, present in mind’s awareness is increasingly given over to chaos. It has not always been this way. There have been interludes of peace, of normality, when the rivers tranquil flow transported commerce, and ordinary ‘gossipy news’ that was a standard mix of fact and wishful fabrication. Now, with assistance from social media, authoritarian regimes are ascendant, not just in our country, but in Brazil, Poland, the Philippines, to name those that come immediately to memory. The pandemic spreads in our country, and in Brazil with deadly consequence, because tyrants only care about maintaining power. Body count is just another abstraction, another unreality.
These are turbulent times, due in great measure to the capabilities of our tools of communication. ‘Human nature’ has not changed that I can tell, since the days of Caligula who ruled Rome. As long as someone else can be blamed for the mayhem, ‘everything is good, and — full speed ahead’. (Then it was the Christians who took the fall, now it is the liberal-terrorists who 
are being rounded up by camo-clad Federal police on the streets of American cities)
In the backyard, this Sunday morning, it’s preternaturally 
quiet. Western Avenue a busy thoroughfare just out of sight, is barely heard with the whisper of an occasional passing vehicle. The morning sunlight angled through the pine branches setting fire to the dark red petals of day lilies. The little Buddha sits impassively at the side of the Japanese maple, gazing down at the red roses, at one or two black-eyed susan blossoms at the border of the lawn.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
excerpt, The Dry Salvages by T. S. Eliot
