Some people practice thermal resistance: we don’t wear summer clothes in April. It’s an irrational impulse that starts every morning in the privacy of the closet. Then you wonder why this stuttering, when you see your reflection pass by in a shop window. Is it a contestation drive or a denial of reality? We are cowards, unable to throw black paint on the symbols of responsible bodies (the responsibility to take global anti-pollution measures is not ours; what we could do is vote carefully). We are recognized in the streets because we wear long sleeves, long pants and a sweater hanging from the waist like a poor monkey. It doesn’t occur to us to wear suspenders. It would be like abandoning ship.
We are the rag resistance, confused people. And when we meet people in shorts and sandals, so cool, we feel a strange sadness; the situation is new, the sensations too. We would like to hold those people by the shoulders and try to make them understand – we don’t understand either – why we think it’s treason to put your toes in the air in April. This crushed spring deserves respect. A mourning
Then I’m on the phone with a friend and he asks what I’m writing. I summarize these lines for you. I love not knowing if it goes with shorts. I explain to him that I am now preparing to introduce, in this topic of environmental confusion, the case of a large hundred-year-old oak, a dying icon of a town. A wonderful tree that is devoured, from the inside, by a bug. The law decides to save the life of the insect, in extinction, at the expense of the tree. Even though the people of the town have the centuries-old custom of going to kiss under those magnificent branches, which, right now, could fall on their heads (it is said that there are neighbors secretly fumigating).
“Don’t you think that we would be a bit like the bug that eats the tree, metaphorically speaking?”, I ask my friend. “That insect is fulfilling its food function to survive, nothing comparable to our gratuitous destruction of the environment; we can choose”, he replies, about to crack up my article. But I’m not so sure anymore that we can choose a less destructive way of life, because we don’t.