Locus Iste

"Locus iste" is a beautiful choir song written by Anton Bruckner in the 19th century. The full first sentence is: "Locus iste a Deo factus est", which simply means: "This place is made by God".

The song indicates the sacred character of the place we are allowed to live in, whether that is our own house, our local house of worship, our village, our town, our country or simply the beautiful landscape we live in. Whether one is a religious person or not, everybody can stand in awe sometimes for the beauty that surrounds him.

It may remind us of the fact that we don't need to go far to discover wonderful things. Before we book a trip to the other end of the world, we may envisage a place nearby we never even took the time to visit earlier. At the age of 55, I'm still discovering nice places I've never been before less than an hour away from home. The concern about the environment is already a  good reason to do that, but in this peculiar year 2020, the Corona crisis offers an extra reason to enjoy more vacation locally.

I refer to my earlier blog: "The Magic of Places".

Triumph of Discord

When the Corona crisis hit Europe, it looked like science would finally prove it could beat the dark ages. The times in which Pieter Brueghel the Elder had painted this picture would never come back. Some people started dreaming of governments of experts. We saw scientists side-by-side with politicians and they would bring humanity back to salvation. 

Not quite. Meanwhile, we know it didn't quite work as expected. Instead of collaborating, the national states closed borders and presented their own doctors and rulers as expert-heroes in matters of Covid-19. There was no good reason to close the borders in Europe. The European Commission could have imposed the same measures in equally-hit neighbouring states. By turning the pandemics into a national problem, the national states started fighting for their own deliveries of mouth masks. The news media started comparing the national states statistic numbers and tried to make clear that this or this government was doing a bad job. 

The problem is: you can't compare absolute numbers of countries that are totally different in number of inhabitants, surface, people density etcetera. Moreover, the statistics were collected in many different ways and therefore incomparable. So in some way, the winner of the corona crisis was not science, but discord.