What now?

What now?

With the massive COVID-19 vaccination campaign, we reach the socalled “new normal.” Humanity woke up one day in early 2020 turned into a Kafka’s character. After an uneasy dream, we have come back to life as Gregorio Samsa, questioning whether it is worth living in a world where smiles are blue folds of three layers; where we’ve lost loved ones, victims of the pandemic, and we’ve seen businesses go bankrupt.

During the days of confinement, in the field of culture, compelled re-readings of works such as The Plague, by Albert Camus or Decamerone, by Bocaccio, both located in contexts of health contingency, emerged. Giovanni Bocaccio’s story is particularly significant: ten young people seclude themselves on the outskirts of Florence to tell ten stories over ten nights, resulting in a hundred tales.

Men and women in the freshness of their age gathered to sing, drink, and dance a few miles from a devastated city: that’s what art did during the pandemic. Literature saved us then. And literature can save us now. Currently, a question is inevitable: Now what? How do we get back on the streets? In 1946, Austrian psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl asked himself the same question. His answer was The Man in Search of Meaning, a work in which he recounted his experience as a prisoner in the concentration camps during World War II. Frankl took advantage of his experience with the human psyche to become a therapist for his peers at

Auschwitz and Dachau. For three years, Frankl witnessed, on one hand, suicides on the electrified fences; on the other, the resilience and patience of hundreds of people sentenced to Nazi torture. Faced with this proof of strength, he wondered what allowed his survival in the most unexpected situation: to give a superior sense of his existence, a direction to take the steps.

For many of those confined in concentration camps, this course was to meet their families once the conflict was over. Frankl then set out to assist his peers in finding the meaning of their lives: to create a reason why it would be worth going through that suffering alive.

Today rereading Frank can help us out of lockdown. Physical confinement can become a mental cloister. Let literature save us once again.