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.
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Studies have shown,…