“Quarantine is not anymore an entertaining new activity, but a lifestyle. As for me, I can’t complain, I’ve been coping with it pretty well. Reading adventure books has helped me as a way of evading reality and feeling as if I had gone for a walk at least, and having the school routine as usual tricks my mind into thinking I actually went outside of my home.”
“In the beginning of quarantine it was an extreme change, especially now that our online classes on team have officially started. I had to get used to looking after my brother, not being around my friends, because we practically live together and to not going on my phone every time I had nothing to do.”
“Only a month ago, you were longing for peace and quiet and a peaceful interruption in the exhausting daily routine, now you only wish for some kind of occupation, even a distraction from all the idleness and the abysmal emptiness of boredom. These spiritual paradoxes, which were formed within a month, prove the basic imperfection of man and our ever-changing desires and desires.”
“The streets of my neighborhood are completely deserted, but every evening someone plays music from their balcony and everybody sings to it! I love how we Italians always manage to be loud!!”
“I live in a quiet place, in the middle of the countryside, so I could at least go for a walk… I live in a pretty big house, but it was hard to stay at home with my mom, my dad and my two brothers… at first it seemed like a little vacation, it’s true… my brother who hates going to school was happy too, but then we realized we couldn’t even go to soccer and dance, so many things started to be missing. “
“Maybe the virus wants to bring us back to reality, to the real meaning of things and wants to teach us all the values that we have gradually obscured, the relationships that we have reset in favour of digital distance. Every day I ask myself: “How good was everything before?!”. Let’s hope everything goes smoothly and gets back to the way it was before!”
“I think, if everyone goes through this time with a positive mindset, it will be easier and you can look forward to enjoy the beautiful weather with your friends in future. I believe that we could master the situation well together.”
“Personally, each day has been a meshed together, and only by checking the date I can see that it’s a… Thursday?? I thought it was a Tuesday… wow I’m more out of the cycle than I realised. On the other hand, I plan on doing more things to keep me engaged other than watching TV and playing videogames, which – don’t get me wrong – are great, however, I’m only human, I have my limits.”
“People are out working hard for us, forcing themselves through that fog of fatigue. Except in theirs, grief at leaving their families and seeing so many deaths is interspersed within it. Driving them through is something more powerful than that harsh, thick fog. They know that right now, we need them and that this pain, this fatigue, this fog, is temporary. That’s what we all need to remember, whether we are on the front line at the hospital or in our homes. It’s temporary.”
Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA),
Stanford University
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Stanford, CA 94305
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