Signs and Wonders: Dispatches From a Time of Beauty and Loss by Delia Falconer

Author:Delia Falconer [Falconer, Delia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Environmentalists & Naturalists, Literary Criticism, Books & Reading, Subjects & Themes, nature, Literary Collections, essays, Social Science, sociology, General
ISBN: 9781760857837
Google: TYYsEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-09-29T23:32:44.452989+00:00

Coronavirus Time: Diary

The sense of time-slip begins during the 2019 megafires. Walking my children home from school in Sydney under a red sun I have the nagging feeling, beneath my anxiety, that I’ve seen this close orange light before. Then I remember. My father made our family nativity set out of pumpkin-coloured cardboard, topped with a skylight of red acrylic. The sideboard lamp cast the same uncanny glow onto baby Jesus and his shadowless entourage.

Three months later, in early March, we are driving with the twins down the New South Wales south coast through green dairy country to isolate from the coronavirus. ‘Does the sky seem particularly blue to you?’ my partner asks, as we look up the valley. ‘I’m having a “severe clear” moment.’ A dark joke between us: pilots used the term to describe a sky of perfect visibility on the morning of 9/11. With most planes in Australia cancelled, there are no bright contrails in the usually busy flight path above the escarpment. The air is alert and tender. It occurs to me that we haven’t seen a sky like this since our own childhoods.

For this whole first week we feel strangely elated. When we last stood in the back paddock of our Airbnb at Christmas, we had watched a huge plume build above the Currowan fire 40 kilometres to the south as white ash fell onto the brown grass. But over the next months, as the eastern seaboard of the country burned, the fires spared this pocket of rainforest tucked beneath the Barren Grounds reserve. The heavy rains that fell in February, the owner tells me, as she nervously keeps her social distance, overflowed the creek and tumbled huge boulders down its bed. The flowering gums in the bush around us give off a scent of honey while the calls of tiny birds electrify the air.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off – my mother used to jokingly quote the title of this musical to me when I was little. ‘Stop the world,’ its hero said, whenever things went wrong. I can’t help feeling relieved that the world has at least paused, for now.

Like Melville’s Ishmael, I am a natural Isolato. An only child and a writer, I feel as if I’ve been training for this moment all my life. But it’s not just me taking pleasure in a world temporarily stilled. A friend texts me video his brother has filmed in Rome of a man walking naked on an empty bridge across the Tiber. On Twitter, people tweet and retweet images of Venetian canals, water so calm you can see fish in their powdery aqua depths. Video recorded by an unseen man walking its empty calles and bridges goes viral: ‘Bizarre!’ he concludes at its end. I email my publisher. When was the last time the canals were this magically clear – when the Brownings were restoring the Ca’ Rezzonico, or in Casanova’s time? He replies that he is amazed by the grand scale of its uncrowded public spaces.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.