Il Panico dei Naufragi
Giuseppe Ungaretti has a wonderful collection of poems with the title L'allegria dei naufragi, the happiness of the shipwrecked. It's about the phase when someone has just survived the storm and is laying on the white sand shore, looking at the palmtrees, enjoying the sunshine and just being happy to be alive. The panic of the shipwrecked comes later. It’s when you know you will be able to get back to life. But you are scared. You don’t want to do it the same way as you had done before. And even though you understand and have processed the theoretical parts of this change, you have no idea what you will actually do. Or when during covid everybody was like “can’t wait to get back to normal”, but you felt like that wasn’t normal. People, societies, humanity as a whole would have really needed to slow down. But of course we got back to “normal”, to familiarity, to our crazy hustle bustle comfort zone, simply because we didn’t know anything else. And when, nearing the end of a s