Lines from another novel, L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between are so often quoted that they verge on cliche: “The past is a foreign country. Right now, though, they have fresh meaning, for this past when we did things differently is only a few short months ago. The job of art is to make familiar things seem strange and strange things familiar. The obvious way to think about those months is that we have been in a kind of sleep. We walked semi-consciously through a landscape we accepted because that was the way things were: injustices, divisions, ways of working and planning equally inimical to family life and the environment.

Source: The Irish Times May 16, 2020 04:52 UTC