This peculiar imprisonment will end, and most people—physically, at least—will be free. Yet, in myriad ways, confinement will continue as it always does
now here, now there, the rules that have kept a large share of the world’s people immured in their homes are being relaxed. There can be no sudden burst from confinement, like young colts in spring. But already the parties are being planned, the long drives to see relations, the sheer revelling in independence and unfettered life. This peculiar imprisonment will end, and most people—physically, at least—will be free.
Confinement, of all kinds and degrees, is part of human life. The word does not normally denote imprisonment, still less isolation, but the setting of limits. Those limits are often self-imposed or set by generally benevolent forces: parents, society. Confinement to the home and thereabouts by state order is rare, but in emergency that too has been, by and large, accepted.
Much of that sort of restriction has disappeared from modern life. It is no longer bearable, though echoes of it have resurfaced in current public-information campaigns: the repeated mantras about hand-washing, the threat of tighter rules for disobedience. But attitudes to confinement are not merely a matter of prevalent social norms. They also lie in the mind and mood of the beholder.
Another self-imposed confinement, for those of a platonic cast of mind, was that of the soul within the body. When souls lost their feathers, as Socrates explained in “Phaedrus”, they fell from the heavenly realms and, on reaching solid ground, took on the covering of mortality. In this double casing of Earth and body, they could experience beauty; on recognising it, they would feel their feathers growing again and recall their heavenly beginnings.
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