Falling in love in a Covidean world
Faced with the finality of the pandemic, humans have an opportunity to move up the evolutionary ladder by uniting against death and disease erotically.
THE French philosopher Alain Badiou describes love as the possibility of transition "from the pure randomness of chance" to destiny, "a state that has universal value". Destiny, the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez suggests, is the "conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves". Love is perhaps the most insistent way of giving birth to oneself - by transforming the inheritance of wayward chance into the tangible legacy of destiny.
Interestingly, the words by Marquez appear in his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera.
Cholera was an existential disease once. The World Health Organization records that it spread across the world from its original reservoir in the Ganges delta in India during the 19th century. Subsequent pandemics killed millions of people in all continents. Cholera is endemic in many countries today.
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