The vastness and strangeness and unreasonable danger of the universe had traumatized everyone it hadn’t killed. There was a hunger to go home, to huddle together, back in the village. The instinct was the opposite of war, and as long as he could see it cultivated, as long as the response to the tragedies of the lockdown were to get one another’s backs and see that everyone who needed care got it, the grief and fear might not turn to more violence.
