Collective action will be much more effective in accomplishing the big, systemic change we truly need…
Both the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis reveal that our world is inextricably interconnected, and it’s as strong or as fragile as those connections. We have to strengthen those connections. It is our only choice. The sun is going to rise again. And I’ll be right there with you. It may not feel like it, but whether we are miles apart or just six feet, we are all in this together. (Heglar, 2020, para. 20)
Heglar, M. A. (2020, March 25). What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus: How to find humanity amid an ever-present dread. The New Republic.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Last night right before I went to bed, my wife and I were talking about the increasingly deteriorating situation of COVID 19, especially in North America, with roaring number of confirmed cases and deaths, my wife mentioned a poem, For whom the bell tolls, written by John Donne, an English writer and Anglican cleric in middle ages, which is a part of his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII and was later taken and named by Ernest Hemingway for his cognominal novel about the Spanish Civil War published in 1940s (Martin, 2020), and “thereafter the passage beginning ‘‘no man is an island’’ gained unprecedented currency; today it is among the most widely quoted bits of non-biblical prose in the English language” (Guibbory, 2006, p. 241).
Here comes the poem, or prose:
For Whom the Bell Tolls
By John Donne
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own were.
Or of thy friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
John Donne wrote Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, his prose meditations on mortality that “concern man’s spiritual and social functioning, especially with regard to illness and death, and serves as a testament to Donne’s insight that the work contains much that strikes deep chords with people living and dying today” (Martin, 2020), during his period of illness when he “took his own seriously diseased body as the text of the miserable condition of Man”, and “at the height of his suffering, recorded in the seventeenth Devotion, Donne hears a bell tolling softly for another and turns this coincidental external event into an unforgettable emblem of human transience. And the poem For whom the bell tolls, Meditation 17, “asserts the interconnected nature of individual lives and analyzes the symbolic significance of an ordinary sound – a funeral bell tolling – in order to demonstrate that no life is separate from any other” (Guibbory, 2006, pp. 158-159), which is the major reason that the poem strikes me so much at such a difficult and even critical moment that the Mankind shall not separate oneself from any other and it is so sad to read the report that 3M, the giant medical device manufacturer based in Minnesota, US, is under great pressure from Trump administration to stop exporting N95 masks currently produced in the United States to other countries, including Canada (Evans, 2020), while at the same time Germany accuses the U.S. of ‘ modern piracy ‘ to divert 200K masks while they were en route from Thailand (Willsher, Borger, & Holmes, 2020), and France has made another similar accuse about Americans buying up Chinese face masks bound for France (France 24, 2020).
Mary A. Heglar is right that “our world is inextricably interconnected and it’s as strong or as fragile as those connections. We have to strengthen those connections. It is our only choice” (Heglar, 2020). One day the pandemic is going to be overcome, by us Mankind, however, it might take us Mankind way more time to overcome the wound left over in our heart for lack of effective collective actions as a union (BALMER, 2020) to timely contain and fight the virus because of the deeply rooted ignorance, indifference, selfishness, stupidity and racism demonstrated over time during this period of time (Lau, 2020), (endofprivacy, 2020).
References
BALMER, C. (2020, April 2). European Commission apologizes to Italy for lack of solidarity in tackling coronavirus pandemic. Retrieved from The Globe and Mail: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-european-commission-apologizes-to-italy-for-lack-of-solidarity-in/
endofprivacy. (2020, March 25). Retrieved from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/fohiwa/deputy_prime_minister_of_japan_taro_aso/
Evans, P. (2020, April 3). 3M faces pressure from Trump order to stop exporting N95 masks to Canada. Retrieved from CBC: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/3m-n95-masks-1.5520326
France 24. (2020, April 3). French politicians accuse US of buying up Chinese face masks bound for France. Retrieved from FRANCE 24: https://www.france24.com/en/20200403-french-politicians-accuse-us-of-buying-up-chinese-face-masks-bound-for-france
Guibbory, A. (2006). The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Heglar, M. A. (2020, March 25). What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus. Retrieved from The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/157059/climate-grief-taught-coronavirus
Lau, S. (2020, March 25). Retrieved from Twitter: https://twitter.com/stuartlauscmp/status/1242778854860754944
Martin, G. (2020, April 03). The meaning and origin of the expression: For whom the bell tolls. Retrieved from The Phrase Finder: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/for-whom-the-bell-tolls.html
Willsher, K., Borger, J., & Holmes, O. (2020, April 3). US accused of ‘modern piracy’ after diversion of masks meant for Europe. Retrieved from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/mask-wars-coronavirus-outbidding-demand
Narda this reading about how the writer felt weighed down by the overwhelming fears of Covid and climate change really sums up -worry of destructive forces beyond our control. It made me think of a quote that to me means that we have to find ways to calm ourselves because we do not have control. We are only able to take each day doing whatever helps us sleep at night and keeps us sane. “When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.”
Rainer Maria Rilke