— Jeremy Ramirez
Reading Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is complementary to the current state of the world. A vast majority of people’s lives were interrupted due to the pandemic. We’ve been for many years in a deep nap of our reality and once in a while we are awakened in a state of shock from an impactful event. A great metaphor of the Modern Era is the philosophical questions that are explored in movies and stories such as The Matrix, Alice In Wonderland, and The Wizard Of Oz. Living in the Information Era, People are waking up, realizing that not everything is rainbows and butterflies living in a fairy tale. Some aspects of reality are dark, disgusting, and harsh and hence, sometimes revealing the truth puts people in a state of shock. New York City is the mecca of the world and a fragile target where major events are amplified. It could be because of how densely populated it is and because of the rich historical-cultural, economic influences it has on the world. For example, 9/11, when twin towers collapsed, it sent a shockwave that woke people up because people didn’t realize this was possible. Another major event and one that I was able to grasp more readily because I was older, was the housing market collapse and the protest on Wall Street. When you investigate, and you dig into a topic, you start going down this rabbit hole and unveiling the truth. For the occupiers it was unveiling the corruption, unveiling the Ponzi schemes, the Bernie Madoffs of the world and the rigged system that enables wealth inequality. Fast forward to the present day of the year 2020, COVID-19 is a virus that is a reminder to us all that we are all fragile beings and at any moment we could die. One thing is for sure that we will all eventually die, whether that be due to health, or an accident, or purposely like a homicide, or by old age. This interjection that we are experiencing together is a time that could be used to reflect on one’s own lives and reevaluate how one ought to live. There is no wrong or right answer, but one should ask, am I doing what is important right now? Every second of one’s life matters and one should make those seconds count. Don’t die with regrets and with the question of was it all worth it? as was in the case of our protagonist of Tolstoy’s story Ivan Ilyich. COVID-19 is a virus that just wants to survive just like any other living organism and the only way it can is to have a host. Animals and people are the best hosts for these viruses for it’s able to replicate itself. We do the same thing on this planet, where we make a copy of ourselves, passing down our genetic code to children. We are the genetic makeup of our parents, and they are of their parents, going up generations trace it all the way back to our ancestors and the first human beings. Anthropologists were able to trace back our existence back to one single person. This means that millions of years ago, from the deep forest of Africa, we all come from one single mother. Maybe it is time for people to set their differences aside, see that war is wasteful, and continue the means of co-existing, eliminating poverty, eradicating classes and class struggles that divides us, and continuing to educate the world to be self-reliant to end human suffering. If we see the world from a different perspective it leaves a humbling impression, like that of astronomers like Carl Sagan, who stated in Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
