![fear small III](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/fear-small-III-1.png)
The Pleasant Embrace of Fear
A young Frenchman of our acquaintance who has spent three years in Australia (so far) spoke to my wife by telephone in March. “C’est quoi, le coronavirus?” he asked (What is it, the coronavirus?), never apparently having heard of it before. There was a delightful freshness to his question.
Talk about the lucky country, I thought to myself: or perhaps I should have thought, talk about a lucky young man, not to have heard of coronavirus. In a way his feat of ignorance had a heroic quality about it, or at any rate indicated a sure sense of navigation through the world without taking any notice of the dispiriting flux of news and daily events. You need finely-tuned antennae to be able to avoid the temporary obsessions of the news media, so ubiquitous are they nowadays, and an ability to slide away mentally from them as some people are able to avert their minds from anything unpleasant.
Anthony Daniels appears in every Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe
Studies have shown,…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins