Connectedness

Chatted on the phone a bit yesterday with Tony. Amongst other things, he updated me with regard to the current situation at the Christchurch Mosque, it being a year since the dreadful killings. He alerted me particularly to the excellent website they've developed, and the Christchurch Invitation thereon. We spoke much of community and it felt particularly appropriate to be doing so in a time of general anxiety when it's becoming ever more apparent that a sense of community is no longer to be seen as an irrelevant luxury.

Then today I got to thinking of Dickens's great novels of the 1850s, particularly Little Dorrit and Bleak House. Dorrit begins with a number of its leading characters stuck in quarantine in Marseilles, whilst the plot of Bleak House revolves partly around an outbreak of smallpox. In both novels, but most especially the latter, disease functions as a disturbing metaphor for our connectedness. Strangely prescient. A metaphor that lives again in very real ways, I'm afraid.