Pandemic: between de-escalation, ostracism and agoraphobia

Much is written about this new time that began one day in January when the first case of COVID-19 in Wuham. With words, we try to express our own and others’ and fill uncertainty. We write to understand and see how the customs of yesterday are articulated with what is happening.

In the newspaper article The country, “Don Quixote confined”, this phrase of the author caught my attention: “Literature does not work in my head right now because life has ceased to exist. You read books to put into practice what you have read through life ”. This definition serves as a trigger to reflect on the pun that I wanted to propose in the title.

From de-escalation to ostracism

Although I agree that the reading has the objective described in the article; Today, literature has the function of recreate the world outside. Characters from novels and short stories make us go around bars, enter bookstores and see people without masks, the one we passed each other before coronavirus.

Those who know Don Quixote know that his goal was to bring into reality what he had read in the cavalry novels, his life made sense like this: going out to star in the adventures he had enjoyed in those pages. In quarantine, he would be lost. Confined, he wouldn’t have that chance. We could even imagine that, due to the confinement, he would have died of sadness.

Today, literature has the function of recreating the world that is outside.

Living saved, we begin to have different reactions. Faced with the new normality, there are at least two groups. On the one hand, those who eagerly launch into the de-escalated. What is this? Another new word for the inventory that we have been targeting for weeks. Define the deconfusion phases that are occurring in different countries. Although the Royal Academy did not see it with pleasure because it was a Anglicism derived from the verb “to escalate”, she had to surrender by force of use when the Spanish press chose her to express the phenomenon.

If on one side those who celebrate the possibility of opening the door and return to the street with a mask and social distance both out of desire and necessity; on the other, those who enlist for comfort or fear enlist they don’t want to stick their nose out into the street. In this second category, the “happy” begins to appear ostracismThose who do not need to go out and find pleasure in voluntary isolation have already declared that they are not going to go to a birthday anymore and that the pandemic was the best way to validate the right to be asocial. Faced with these who have a good time, they are the others, those who experience an incipient agoraphobia: There is a threat outside and they are afraid to go out. Both of them look for a way to adapt to this called “new normal” where certainties are an endangered species.