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The need of the former life

This article is published in issue 18 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 3, 2022

how nice to have (at least) a glimpse of former life, of the former world. We did it in 14 million traveling in the company of the Easter egg, last week, a bit of the sea, some cherry trees in bloom, the kids on the swing. We did it again, just the day before yesterday, celebrating the feast of April 25, which at this turn of the day, with the ashes of the bombings on invaded Ukraine, seemed to us a feast of liberation a little more full of meaning than usual. .

The new world around us has become a siege. Two years of Covid with fasting squares, hotels and restaurants. And at the end, to complete the work, the depression, the isolation, the fatalism rescued to counteract ancestral fears of universal contagion and multiple delirium of the harassing No Vax. Then the war began, a human exclusive, a male specialty. It lit up just at the borders of our Europe, as no one expected, except the Ukrainians, the Russians, the Americans, the Chinese, the European diplomacies and the usual one hundred thousand generals who every morning dress up with the medals polished by Sidol on the chest, to make it, war. And retired ones to comment on it, every night in the talk show gardens, before and after the massacres perfected in the mass graves of Mariupol and Bucha.

This time the calendar gave us a go-ahead, like in the old days, and we launched ourselves as we do from the rock, when the sun cooks our heads and the air. “Exodus!” the accountants of social algebra sang: “130 thousand tourists in Venice!”; “All in line in Rome”; “7 billion euros spent on the bridge!”; «The cities of art are full!». Even the geographical maps to be analyzed together on TV have returned to neutral – in these days of festive celebration, no longer red lockdown areas, nor cemeteries of the invaded lands, but harmless villages for slow tourism that is supplanting hit and run, even if it lasts as long, 48-72 hours, experts say, but it is at least proximity, ecological, sustainable, even better if with the bonus terme and the discounted spa, rain permitting. The only tourism that is missing is the Russian one, but since it is worth less than 2 percent of the proceeds, including the bottles of Cristal and the oysters with which the oligarchs’ triglycerides make breakfast, who cares.

To cool the holiday we thought the Monetary Fund which cut all growth estimates, Italy from 3.8 per cent expected to a melancholy 2.3, because neither the war nor the virus will go away from somewhere else part of the universe. The consumer crisis will continue. And also that of production in the factories. There will be no Russian gas and Ukrainian wheat. The Omicron variant will not let go. There will be widespread misery and social damage. But in the meantime, we took this breath of fresh air. Man is a joyful machine that sells and buys, wrote George Saunders, chases things, takes them home, then goes out to buy others. Desire is the most valuable commodity. And sometimes even oblivion, when it becomes a holiday.

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Source: Vanity Fair

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